Now an emeritus research professor, Dr. Breedon was a member of the physics faculty at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) for more than 27 years.
DAVIS, CA, October 12, 2021 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Richard Earl Breedon, PhD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Breedon celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Breedon is an experimental high-energy particle physicist and educator who has worked extensively on experiments at laboratories in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He most recently in 2016–2018 taught a course called Survey of High Energy Physics Experiments at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Becoming widely published, Dr. Breedon has also disseminated his findings by authoring or co-authoring over 1,200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and professional publications.
Now an emeritus research professor, Dr. Breedon was a member of the physics faculty at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) for more than 27 years. He is a founding member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He is thus a co-discoverer of the Higgs boson, a particle associated with the Higgs field that gives mass to other particles in the universe. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by CMS and its sister experiment ATLAS led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2013 to two of the theorists who had predicted the particle. UC Davis is one of three US institutions to have contributed to the original proposal of the CMS experiment for the LHC.
Dr. Breedon grew up in Hudson, Ohio, and obtained a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and physics at nearby Kent State University in 1977. Following a stint as an administrator at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, he began graduate studies at the University of Rochester in New York, where he earned a Master of Science in physics in 1980. After working on ion-stopping power measurements at the Hahn-Meitner Institute for Nuclear Research in West Berlin during 1980 and on high-energy physics measurements at the first proton–proton collider, the Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, from 1980 to 1982, Dr. Breedon received a Doctor of Philosophy in experimental high-energy physics at Rockefeller University in New York City in 1988. In his dissertation, he compared proton–proton to proton–anti-proton elastic scattering from measurements with a gas-jet target at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron as part of the UA6 experiment. Some of these results have been claimed to be the first experimental hint of a particle state confirmed in 2021 called the "odderon".
Upon graduation and already able to speak Japanese from his studies in New York, Dr. Breedon joined UC Davis to lead its group working on the AMY Experiment at the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics in Tsukuba, Japan. During four of the years from 1989 to 1994, he was named as a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Photo captions (clockwise from left):
Richard Earl Breedon, PhD
Richard Breedon standing in front of the superconducting solenoid magnet of the CMS experiment while it was under construction in 2006.
Performing a headstand while wearing the protective clothing required to work in the CMS assembly building.
Breedon at CERN posing with his camera.
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