For more than 40 years, physicist John Conway has led research in high-energy particle physics, a field driven by a simple yet profound goal: to understand what the universe is made of and how it works.
He is this month’s guest on Face to Face With Chancellor May. Conway’s career has been fueled by the thrill of colliding subatomic particles at extraordinary energies and capturing the results with some of the most sophisticated instruments ever built.
“It’s something I could never let go off — this idea that you can collide particles and create new matter out of just the energy,” Conway said. “I’ve never lost passion for it.”
A centerpiece of his work has been his involvement with the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, experiment at the Large Hadron Collide at CERN in Switzerland. Most notably, CMS played a key role in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a milestone that confirmed a fundamental piece of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Conway also highlights UC Davis’ contributions to the CMS experiment. Since the early 1990s, researchers and students from the university have been deeply involved in designing, building and operating critical components of the detector, as well as analyzing the vast amounts of data it produces, Conway said.
Chancellor Gary S. May congratulated Conway and his colleagues for these discoveries.
“That's a real point of pride for UC Davis,” May said.
Conway warns that the future of such groundbreaking work depends heavily on sustained federal support. Reductions in funding could slow or halt major experiments, limit opportunities for students and erode U.S. leadership in fundamental science.
Watch the episode to learn more about the experiment, Conway’s favorite hobby and whether he prefers Star Trek or Star Wars.
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Anila Lijo is a writer and editor for the Office of Strategic Communications, and can be reached by email.