Heidi M. Schellman

Biosketch

Heidi Schellman, PhD, is Professor Emerita in the Department of Physics at Oregon State University. She previously served as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at Northwestern University. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Stanford University and her Doctorate in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley for work on the Mark II experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She did her postdoctoral work in neutrino physics at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and as a Wilson Fellow at Fermilab before joining Northwestern University in 1990. She moved to Oregon State University as Head of the Department of Physics in 2015.

She has served in numerous leadership roles in high energy physics, including spokesperson for the international E665 muon-scattering collaboration and computing coordinator for the NuTeV, D0, MINERvA and DUNE collaborations. She has served as chair of the Particle Physics Commission of the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics and of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Heidi Schellman's research focuses on the interface between weak and strong interaction physics and on large-scale computing systems for high energy physics experiments. Schellman’s research has concentrated on precision measurements of weak interaction parameters in proton-antiproton scattering and neutrino interactions. Weak interactions provide a powerful tool for understanding fundamental interactions but are often masked by the strong and electromagnetic interactions. Her research includes measurements of the Weinberg angle in both neutrino and proton-antiproton scattering and precision measurements of the W boson mass.

High energy physicists work in international collaborations of hundreds of scientists. They need to preserve and analyze petabytes of data efficiently, reproducibly and cooperatively. As computing coordinator for a series of experiments she has designed and implemented multi-national data handling and processing systems that provide collaborators with timely access to well-documented common data samples. She is currently involved in measurements of particle interaction cross sections with the MINERvA and protoDUNE experiments and the design of global computing systems in preparation for future neutrino astrophysics data from the DUNE neutrino detectors at the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in South Dakota.