Douglas H Beck

Douglas H Beck is a Professor and Director of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory (NPL) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Department of Physics, within the Grainger College of Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1986) and a bachelor's degree from the University of Saskatchewan (1979). Prior to his position at Illinois, he was a senior research fellow at Caltech and served as a Gordon and Betty Moore Distinguished Scholar (2013).

Beck's research focuses on nuclear and particle physics, particularly parity-violating electron scattering to study quark distributions in nucleons, strange quark contributions, and neutron electric dipole moment measurements. His leadership in the G0 experiment at Jefferson Lab involves a superconducting toroidal spectrometer. He has received prestigious awards including APS Fellow (2002), NSF Young Investigator (1992-1997), and Sloan Research Fellow (1991).

• Education:
  • Ph.D., Physics, MIT, 1986
  • Bachelor's, Physics, University of Saskatchewan, 1979

His teaching includes courses such as Quantum Physics I/II and Undergraduate Physics, with recognition as an outstanding instructor. Beck's work bridges fundamental physics questions about matter structure and time-reversal violation, contributing to experiments like the neutron electric dipole moment project.