Jim Brau is a Philip H. Knight Professor of Natural Science at the University of Oregon. He was hired in 1988 to build an experimental high energy physics group complementing the established theory group at Oregon; his group has grown to five faculty and approximately 30 additional researchers. Director of the Center for High Energy Physics, Brau has been principal investigator on DOE and NSF grants totalling over $30 million since 1988.
Background
The son of James Ernest and Rose Brau, James Edward Brau was reared in Tacoma, Washington. His father was a hardwood flooring carpenter, and his mother was chief telephone operator at McChord AFB. As a child he played sports at the Tacoma Boys' Club, and he became a fan of Ted Williams and the Boston Red Sox.
Education
Brau was graduated from Lincoln High School in 1965. He was elected Lincoln's student body president, 1964-65, and won the award for top physical science student in 1965. Rep. Thor Tollefson appointed him to the United States Air Force Academy, where he majored in physics and math, earning his B.S. as a Distinguished Graduate and the 1969 Outstanding Cadet in Physics. He earned his S.M. in physics at M.I.T. in 1970 working with Irwin Pless. He completed his Ph.D. in physics at M.I.T. in 1978 with advisor Richard K. Yamamoto, using data collected at Fermilab.
Career
Jim Brau completed his service in the United States Air Force as an officer with the Guidance Test Directorate at Holloman AFB and with the Theoretical Branch of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB, both in New Mexico. In those assignments he performed laser kinetics modelling, laser-target interaction studies, and high altitude electromagnetic pulse research, working with Gregory Canavan. He left the Air Force in 1974 at the rank of Captain.
At the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), he researched anti-proton nucleon annihilation and photoproduction with a backscattered laser beam. He also managed the design, construction, operation, and analysis of a lead glass detector used in the Hybrid Bubble Chamber Facility.
While on faculty for six years at the University of Tennessee, he taught graduate and undergraduate physics courses, and continued to participate in experiments at SLAC, working with William Bugg. Brau collaborated with colleague Tony Gabriel at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in a Monte Carlo study and analysis of compensation in liquid argon readout, showing low energy neutrons and hydrogen readout to be important in achieving compensation. He served as co-spokesperson on experiments involving photoproduction of vector mesons and charmed particles, and participated in the design and construction of the Stanford Linear Detector (SLD) for studies of electron-positron collisions at the Z-zero resonance in the Stanford Linear Collider.
Jim Brau joined the physics department at the University of Oregon in 1988, where he was specifically hired to develop an experimental particle physics group to join the well-established theoretical particle physics effort at Oregon. He was the first of five faculty in the High Energy Physics group, and was the Director of the Center for High Energy Physics from its inception in 1999 through June 2016. There are approximately 30 researchers in the experimental group as of 2016.
He has conducted physics and detector studies for the Linear Collider, as well as studies of electroweak symmetry breaking with SLD and NuTev. He joined the BaBar experiment at SLAC studying CP violation and rare heavy flavor decays. His research explores the high energy frontier with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and the search for gravitational radiation with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. He served on the International Linear Collider Steering Committee from 2005 through 2008, and on the International Linear Collider Global Design Effort Central Team, from 2005 to 2013. He served as co-chair of the American Linear Collider Physics Group from 2002-2013.
His curriculum vitae lists more than 1,300 publications.
Jim Brau's teaching assignments at Oregon include graduate level courses in high energy physics, and undergraduate courses in astronomy for non-majors. Since 2005 and the centennial Einstein celebration, he has offered a series of very popular public lectures on physics topics, such as "Realizing Einstein's Dream," "Particles, Energy and Cosmology," "The Higgs Boson: Window on the Big Bang," and "Riding Gravitational Waves Through Space-time."
Connections
Brau married in 1969 and has two sons and four grandchildren.