Berndt Mueller (center) is shown as he was presented the award by Tom Clegg, SESAPS Chair. Mueller was nominated for, and introduced before receiving the award, by his department chair, Dan Gauthier (left).

Professor Berndt Mueller, James B. Duke Professor of Physics at Duke University, was selected to receive the 2007 Jesse W. Beams award of the Southeastern Section of the APS (SESAPS) for outstanding physics research performed in the SE. The award was presented on November 9 at the 2007 SESAPS fall meeting in Nashville.

Professor Mueller received this award in recognition of his leadership in theoreti­cal nuclear physics.  Among his many achievements, he is known for the prediction of a new state of matter known as a quark-gluon plasma. His seminal contribu­tions to understanding of the physics of nuclear matter at ultra-high density include signatures for quark deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration at high energy and baryon density, and theoretical tools for the description of nuclear collisions at the highest energies. These contributions motivate a major part of the research program at the nation’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Professor Mueller joined the Duke University faculty in 1990, and has served at Duke both as Chair of the Physics Department and as Dean of Natural Sciences.  He previously received a Humboldt Foundation U.S. Senior Scientist Award, and is a Fellow of both the APS and the AAAS.