Howard Georgi

Howard Mason Georgi III is Harvard College Professor and Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Physics and Master of Leverett House. In 1995 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the J.J.Sakurai Prize. In 2000 he shared the Dirac Medal with Jogesh Pati and Helen Quinn. He is best known for early work in Grand Unification and gauge coupling unification withing SU(5) (Georgi-Glashow model) and SO(10) groups. He later proposed the supersymmetric Standard Model with Savas Dimopoulos in 1981. It is also worth mentioning his role in the Georgi-Quinn-Weinberg computation showing that the natural mass scale of unification is relatively close to the Plank scale and that the proton lifetime can naturally be extremely long. He has since worked on several different areas of physics including composite Higgs models, heavy quark effective theory, dimensional deconstruction and little Higgs theories. Most recently, with Arkani-Hamed and Cohen, he has found a class of 4-dimensional field theories in which extra dimensions can arise dynamically, providing a new slant of the meaning of space. The topological properties of such theories may shed light on critical issues such as the breaking of SU(2)xU(1) and supersymmetry. He continues to study these issues in the hopes they will shed light on the meaning of gauge symmetry.