David W. Hertzog

Biosketch

David Hertzog is the Arthur B. McDonald Distinguished Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics (CENPA) at the University of Washington. Hertzog earned his BA in physics from Wittenberg University and his MS and PhD from the College of William & Mary in Virginia. His doctoral thesis involved determining the magnetic moment of the sigma-minus hyperon using atomic physics techniques. As a Carnegie Mellon University postdoctoral fellow, he transitioned to the emerging field of low-energy antiproton physics at CERN. In 1986 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), rising to the rank of Professor by 1997. During that time he developed unique instrumentation for both antiproton and precision muon physics experiments. In 2010, he joined the faculty of the University of Washington and co-led the development the new Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab. Hertzog was a 2004 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the 2022 winner of the APS Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics. He is a Fellow of the APS, and in 2025 became a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

David Hertzog leads the Precision Muon Physics Group at the University of Washington, which develops unique experiments that determine fundamental quantities in subatomic physics. The group has led experiments from conception to the development of unique instrumentation, to running, analysis and publication stages. Notably, the group determined the muon’s lifetime (Fermi constant), the proton weak pseudoscalar coupling, and the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment. Hertzog co-initiated and led the lifetime and moment experiments. Most recently he co-initiated, and is Spokesperson for PIONEER, a new rare pion decay experiment approved with high priority at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland that aim to make the world’s most sensitive test of lepton universality.