Paul Souder, a renowned nuclear physicist in the College of Arts and Sciences, will be honored at a daylong fete on campus.
Paul Souder
The “Symposium to Celebrate the Work of Paul Souder” will take place on Sunday, July 13, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Physics Building. The event requires registration. For more information, contact Penny Davis in the physics department at 315-443-5960 or davis@phy.syr.edu.
“Professor Souder is a truly outstanding physicist who has made major contributions to our understanding of the internal structure of the proton and neutron,” says A. Alan Middleton, professor and chair of physics. “His work in medium-energy particle physics has spawned one of the most successful research programs at Syracuse University.”
The symposium is co-organized by Krishna Kumar, professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst); Kent Paschke, associate professor of physics at the University of Virginia (UVA); and Gordon Cates, professor of physics at UVA.
Sponsors are the Department of Physics and the Office of the Dean; UVA; and UMass Amherst.
The symposium will feature remarks by an array of luminaries, some of whom are in town for the PAVI 14 physics conference, which Souder is co-chairing. They include the following:
• Charles J. Horowitz, professor of nuclear physics and astrophysics at Indiana University Bloomington;
• Emlyn Hughes, professor of particle physics at Columbia University;
• Yury G. Kolomensky, professor of particle physics at the University of California Berkeley;
• Michael Lubell, the Mark W. Zemansky Professor of Physics at The City College of New York;
• William Marciano, a theoretical physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory;
• Charles Y. Prescott, professor emeritus of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford University; and
• Michael Ramsey-Musolf, professor of physics and director of the Amherst Center for Fundamental Interactions at UMass Amherst.
Last summer, Souder made headlines when he received one of the field’s highest honors: the Outstanding Nuclear Physicist Award from Jefferson Science Associates (JSA). He was selected by JSA for his leadership in the development of parity-violating electron scattering as a tool for the study of nucleon and nuclear structure, as well as for precision studies of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Middleton explains: “Paul has been able to gather precise information about the size and charge distribution of protons and neutrons—information critical to the study of the fundamental processes in nuclear physics. This discovery may provide fresh insights into the Standard Model of particle physics and resolve some unanswered questions about the nature and origins of the universe.”
Souder joined the Syracuse University faculty in 1983, following appointments at Harvard and Yale universities. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a prolific scholar, with more than 100 articles to his credit. Souder is also an internationally sought-after speaker who earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
