LANS 2010 Keynote Speaker - Jim Gates

Slyvester “Jim” Gates is the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university in the United States. Gates has held appointments at MIT, Harvard, the California Institute of Technology and Howard University and has served as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Educational Testing Service and Time-Life Books, and is a member of the Maryland State Board of Education.  Gates was named in April 2009 by President Obama as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).  Gates has also been engaged in many issues of science and education policy at the international level.

Professor Gates is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and was named by AAAS as the winner of its 2006 Public Understanding of Science and Technology Award. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), and the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP), where he was a past president. Gates was the first recipient of the APS Bouchet Award. In 1983, he co-authored the book "Superspace: 1001 Lessons in Supersymmetry," which more than two decades later remains a standard in the field. He has authored or co-authored over 200 research papers published in scientific journals, and contributed numerous articles in others. Gates has also appeared in four scientific documentaries on PBS.

Among his students, Professor Gates is known as an inspiring teacher and role model. He has received many awards for his work as an educator. His awards include the MIT Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award (1997), the College Science Teacher of the Year of the Washington Academy of Sciences (1999), honorary Ph.D. degrees from Georgetown University (2001) and Loyola University-Chicago (2005), the Klopsteg Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers (2002). Gates delivered the annual Karplus Lecture to the National Science Teacher’s Association (2007), and received the Public Understanding of Science & Technology Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007).

Dr. Gates has a B.S. degree in both mathematics and physics, and a Ph.D. degree in elementary particle physics and quantum field theory, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His thesis was the first written at MIT on supersymmetry, an area closely related to string theory.