Hong Ma

Hong Ma serves as Chair of the Physics Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, overseeing approximately 250 staff and premier DOE-funded research programs in nuclear and particle physics. He joined Brookhaven in 1989 as a postdoc, progressing through ranks to Senior Physicist with tenure (2016) before becoming Department Chair in July 2016.

Education

• Bachelor of Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, 1983
• Ph.D. in Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1988

Research Focus

Dr. Ma's career centers on experimental high-energy physics with emphasis on collider experiments and precision measurements. His work spans two major eras: pioneering kaon decay experiments at Brookhaven's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) during the 1990s to probe symmetry violations, and critical contributions to the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider culminating in the 2012 Higgs boson discovery. Current efforts focus on the Liquid Argon Calorimeter Upgrade for the High Luminosity LHC.

Leadership and Impact

As Department Chair, Dr. Ma directs Brookhaven's nuclear/particle physics portfolio while maintaining active research leadership. His career demonstrates sustained impact across detector development (Liquid Argon Calorimeter), data analysis (Higgs discovery), and experimental design (AGS kaon program), with all work centered on testing Standard Model predictions and searching for new physics phenomena.