Presenters

Sylvester James Gates Jr.

S. James Gates Jr. has focused his research on the mathematical and theoretical physics of “supersymmetric” particles, fields, and “strings,” including topics such as the physics of quarks, leptons, gravity, super and heterotic strings, and unified field theories of the type first envisioned by Albert Einstein. Gates’s work has been featured, along with that of several fellow physicists working in superstring theory, in a 1996 television program titled “The Path of Most Resistance,” part of the PBS television series Breakthrough: The Changing Face of Science in America.

Born in 1950, Gates earned undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. He was awarded a Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1977 for studies of elementary particles and quantum field theory, with his thesis on “supersymmetry” being the first devoted to this topic at MIT. After postgraduate study with the Harvard Society of Fellows, he returned to MIT to teach for two years before joining the University of Maryland at College Park in 1984. In 1998 he was named the first John S. Toll Professor of Physics at College Park and thus became the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university in the United States. Since 2002, he also is director of the university’s Center for String and Particle Theory.

A Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Society of Black Physicists (of which he is a past president), Gates was the first recipient of the APS’s Bouchet Award and has served as a consultant for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and Time-Life Books. MIT awarded him its Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award in 1997. In 1999 the Washington Academy of Sciences named him its College Teacher of the Year, and in 2002 he received the Klopsteg Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers.