Prize Recipient

Bruce Owen Knuteson
University of California, Berkeley

Citation:

"For his development of the innovative SLEUTH algorithm, and its successful application to a sensitive search for new phenomena in high-energy interactions at the DO Experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron. The results of this work have the potential for changing fundamentally the way that particle physicists approach searches for new physics."

Background:

Bruce Knuteson graduated summa cum laude from Rice University with a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics in 1997, and received a Physics Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. Currently he is a McCormick Fellow at the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, and an NSF International Research Fellow at CERN.

Knuteson's doctoral research produced a novel strategy for mining data to identify unexpected phenomena. He used it to carry out a model-independent search for new physics in high energy proton-antiproton collider data. This research was performed with the DZero experiment at Fermilab under the supervision of Mark Strovink.

More recently, Knuteson has developed a method for making high energy collider data publicly accessible, allowing physicists outside a collaboration to meaningfully analyze the experiment's data. He has used it to make available DZero data from Run I of the Fermilab Tevatron. Currently Knuteson is working with collaborations at the LEP Collider at CERN to accomplish a similar goal. He is now a member of the CDF Collaboration, and aims to help uncover something interesting in Tevatron Run II.

Knuteson was supported as a Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow and a Department of Physics Fellow while at Berkeley, and has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Pi Sigma, and Sigma Xi.

 

Selection Committee:

Professor Tom Ferbel (Chair), Dan Marlow (Vice-Chair), Janet Conrad, Bob Lanou, Bernard Sadoulet