February 2005

Election of Professor Daniela Bortoletto to Fellowship in the American Physical Society

Professor Daniela Bortoletto has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The official citation is:

For important contributions to top and bottom quark physics and leadership in the development and fabrication of precision silicon detectors.

Professor Daniela Bortoletto is an outstanding, internationally known, elementary particle physics experimentalist and a leading member of the CDF collaboration. The CDF experiment, at the Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, is searching for new physical phenomena at the highest energies ever produced by studying in detail known particles such as the heavy quarks: top and bottom, and searching for new particles such as the Higgs, which is believed to give rise to all of the mass in the universe, and supersymmetry, a theory that predicts that for every particle there is a corresponding particle that has yet to be discovered. Daniela was a co- discoverer of the top quark, where together with her students she played a crucial role.

She is an internationally recognized leader in the design and development of silicon detectors that measure the trajectories of subatomic particles with a precision of a few microns. She is a sub-project leader for the forward pixel detector project for the CMS experiment which will take data later this decade using the Large Hadron Collider, at the European laboratory for particle physics, CERN, in Switzerland, at an energy seven times higher than at CDF.

She is also developing novel silicon detectors for the Linear Collider, a proposed new accelerator for the next decade and beyond. She was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society Division of Particle and Fields in 2003 and was a co-convener of a Town Meeting in Washington, D.C. as part of a National Academy of Science program to plan the future of Elementary Particle Physics for the next two decades in November 2004.

Daniela Bortoletto received her Ph. D. from Syracuse University in 1989. She has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1996-1998) and a Purdue University Scholar (1999-2004). She received the NSF Early Career Award in 1997, the NSF Career Advancement Award in 1994 and the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from Purdue University in 2004. She is a longstanding member of the International Committee for the silicon technology development and application to particle physics conference series, known as VERTEX. She was Chair and organizer of VERTEX 2000. She has been a member of numerous National Science Foundation and Department of Energy panels and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Executive Committee. She began her work in particle physics at the Omega spectrometer at CERN as an Italian Government fellow. She then joined the CLEO experiment at Cornell University where she produced seminal results on the properties of the beauty quark.

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