Roberto Peccei

Roberto Daniele Peccei ([petˈtʃɛi]; born January 6, 1942) is former Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California Los Angeles, a position he held from 2000-2010. He is a particle theorist whose principal interests lie in the area of electroweak interactions and in the interface between particle physics and physical cosmology.

The son of Aurelio Peccei, founder of the Club of Rome, Roberto Peccei was born in 1942 in Italy, completed his secondary school in Argentina, and came to the United States in 1958 to pursue his university studies in physics. He obtained a B.S. from MIT in 1962, and M.S. from New York University (NYU) in 1964 and a Ph.D. from the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics in 1969.

After a brief period of postdoctoral work at the University of Washington, he joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1971, where (with Helen Quinn) he originated Peccei–Quinn theory, still the most famous proposed solution to the strong CP problem. In 1978, he returned to Europe as a staff member of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany. He joined the Deutsches Elektron Synchrotron (DESY) Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, as the Head of the Theoretical Group in 1984. He returned to the United States in 1989, joining the faculty of the Department of Physics at UCLA. Soon thereafter, he became Chair of the Department, a position he held until becoming Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences of the College of Letters and Sciences in November, 1993.

Peccei is currently on the Editorial Board of Nuclear Physics B Supplement, and the Journal of Physics G. He is a member of the Club of Rome, a Trustee of the World Academy of Art and Science and President of the Fondazione Aurelio Peccei and is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom. In the last 15 years, he has served on numerous advisory boards both in Europe and in the U.S. He currently chairs both the Scientific Advisory Board for the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at Cornell University and the Visiting Committee for the Laboratory of Nuclear Science at MIT. He is also a member of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Physics at MIT and is the Convener of the Vice Chancellor for Research Council in the University of California.

• Fellow of the American Physical Society
• Recipient of the American Physical Society’s 2013 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics