Zvi Bern

Zvi Bern is a theoretical physicist known for his pioneering work on quantum-mechanical scattering amplitudes for elementary particles, involving quarks and gluons, as well as gravitons and their interactions with matter. He is one of the originators of the unitarity method for computing high-order perturbative corrections to scattering processes leading to new insights such as the “double copy” relations that express gravitational scattering amplitudes in terms of gauge-theory ones. These ideas have been applied to a variety of problems in collider physics, quantum field theory and gravitational-wave physics. He grew up in Queens, New York, and attended the Bronx High School of Science, where his passion for physics was sparked. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received dual bachelors degrees in physics and mathematics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and held postdoctoral positions at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1992. In 2016, he became the founding director of the Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCLA. In 2014,
he was awarded the J.J Sakurai Prize from the American Physical Society for his work on scattering amplitudes, which he shared with his long-time collaborators Lance Dixon and David Kosower. In 2023 they received the Galileo Galilei Medal from the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN).