Wendell T. Hill

Wendell T. Hill, III holds the rank of Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, (UMD) with appointments in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and the Department of Physics. He is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and the director of the graduate Chemical Physics Program at UMD.

His research interests are broad with publications ranging from high-energy particle physics to ultracold atoms, and include the physics text “Light-Matter Interaction: Atoms and Molecules in External Fields and Nonlinear Optics,” (co-authored with Chi H. Lee) published in 2007 by Wiley and the introductory chapter on Electromagnetic Radiation for the Encyclopedia of Applied Spectroscopy, published in 2009 by Wiley. His current research falls into three areas within atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics, with a focus on quantum behavior of matter at three extremes: (1) ultrafast timescales enabled with femtosecond and attosecond lasers to probe and control electrons in atoms and molecules; (2) ultra-intense electromagnetic fields induced by petawatt-class lasers to study relativistic electron dynamics and strong-field, nonlinear quantum electrodynamics (QED); and (3) ultracold, degenerate gases as quantum simulators to explore fundamental quantum processes. He has served on advisory committees for international laser facilities, committees for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and as the program officer for the Experimental AMO program for the National Science Foundation.

Hill was a National Research Council (NRC) Postdoctoral Fellow, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the National Society of Black Physicists.