Glennys R. Farrar

Biosketch

Glennys R. Farrar is a Collegiate Professor of Physics and Julius Silver, Rosalind S. Silver and Enid Silver Winslow Professor at New York University. She received her B.A. in Physics from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1967 and Ph. D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1971, the first woman to do so. She was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1971-1973, then Research Scientist at Caltech from 1973-1974. She was promoted to Assistant Professor at Caltech in 1974, but was converted to Senior Research Scientist in 1977, ostensibly to avoid that she would come up for tenure review. She joined the faculty of Rutgers University in 1979, then moved to NYU in 1998 to be Chair of the Physics Department. In 2001 she founded the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and served as its Director for seven years. Farrar is a recent Chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society and a member of the Snowmass 2021 Steering Committee. She is a Fellow of APS and AAAS; received Sloan, Guggenheim and Simons Fellowships; serves on advisory panels for NASA, NSF and the European Research Council, and is an editor of the Journal of Cosmology and Particle Physics.

Research Interests

Farrar's primary research goal is discovering the identify of the Dark Matter which comprises more than 80% of the matter in the Universe, yet does not contain protons and neutrons making it fundamentally different than any known type of matter. She is currently investigating whether it can be composed of quarks in a hard-to-discern form that has eluded discovery, or must be evidence of an entirely new sub-nuclear world as usually assumed. Other interests are the origin of the excess of matter over anti-matter (without which the Universe would be devoid of galaxies, stars and life), the strong CP puzzle (why the neutron electric dipole moment is a billion times smaller than expected), the origin of the Galactic magnetic field and sources of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays.

Prof. Farrar has made seminal contributions to theoretical particle physics, including demonstrating that quarks are not just mathematical constructs but are actually physically present in matter (Brodsky-Farrar 1973) and pioneering the search for supersymmetry (Farrar-Fayet 1976), a prime objective of the Large Hadron Collider. With students she also made fundamental contributions to astrophysics: discovering the existence of an unexpected large-scale poloidal component of the magnetic field of the Milky Way (Jansson-Farrar 2012) and uncovering the first unambiguous examples of “stellar tidal disruption” when a supermassive black hole tears a passing star to shreds (vanVelzen-Farrar+ 2011).