Antarctica Direct: Fly the Drake Passage

David Saltzberg is a Professor of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA where his research interests include high-energy neutrino astronomy and the Large Hadron Collider. He has traveled to Antarctica five times for his research (and Greenland once) over 20 years, including McMurdo Station as well as remote field camps on the high polar plateau and the Ross Ice Shelf. For this work, he was recognized with the Antarctic Service Medal by the National Science Foundation. Prior to coming to UCLA, he received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1989 from Princeton University where he worked at the cyclotron; he received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1994, where at Fermilab’s Tevatron he contributed to the discovery of the top quark; he worked at CERN, looking for neutrino oscillations with photographic emulsion. In his early career at UCLA, he received a Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and has been awarded the society’s Mentoring Award and Instrumentation Award from the Division of Particles and Fields. Saltzberg was the science consultant for The Big Bang Theory since its pilot episode. He checked scripts and met with the producers, writers, set decorators, prop masters, etc. to ensure scientific accuracy. He subsequently consulted on a number of other television programs, “Manhattan”, “The Leftovers”, “Scijinks”, and “The Watchmen”, and “Young Sheldon”, and recently for the Oscar-winning film “Oppenheimer”. The asteroid “8628 Davidsaltzberg” is named after him.