Michael Witherell

Witherell is one of the nation's leading experimental particle physicists. He made major contributions to studies of the charm and bottom quarks and the violation of particle-antiparticle symmetry, developing new instrumentation to do so. He also led an experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta decay using Ge detectors. His recent research has been on an underground experiment designed to search for interactions of particles that could make up the dark matter. He has led two major national laboratories, Fermilab and (currently) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He also was Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Santa Barbara for ten years.