Roger Falcone is the 2018 President of the American Physical Society. He has been a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley since 1983. He chaired the department from 1995-2000, and is an affiliated faculty member of Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. He has been the director of the Advanced Light Source x-ray synchrotron facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab since 2006.
Falcone received his A.B. in Physics (1974) from Princeton, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1979) from Stanford, and was a Marvin Chodorow Fellow in Applied Physics (1980-83) at Stanford.
He serves on the Science and Technology Committee for the Board of Governors of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs; chairs the Advisory Board for Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland; is director of the UC Institute for Materials Dynamics at Extreme Conditions; was Co-Chair of the NSF-DMR Committee for the report: NSF Materials 2022; and is past member of the APS Panel on Public Affairs.
Falcone is a Fellow of APS, OSA, and AAAS. He shared the APS Szilard Lectureship (2005) with the APS Study Group for National Missile Defense; shared the Halbach Prize for Instrumentation at the ALS, LBNL (2000) with R.W. Schoenlein; was a Distinguished Traveling Lecturer of the APS Laser Science Topical Group (1992-93); and received a Young Investigator Award from the NSF (1984).
Falcone's research primarily involves the interaction of intense light and x-rays with matter, and he has co-authored over 150 publications. He has developed technologies and techniques to study matter at extreme conditions using ultrashort-pulse lasers and fast detectors.