Professor of Physics David W. Hertzog has been selected as one of ten 2000-01 University Scholars at the University of Illinois' Urbana campus. The program recognizes excellence, while helping to identify and retain the University's most talented teachers, scholars, and researchers. "The University Scholars Program is the premier recognition accorded to faculty at the UI by their colleagues," said Michael Aiken, the Urbana chancellor. "In honoring these outstanding members of the faculty, selected by their peers, we recognize at the same time the highest values of the university." The Scholars were honored at a dinner hosted by Chancellor Aiken on November 30.

Professor Hertzog is an experimental nuclear (medium energy) physicist whose research probes the fundamental nature of matter at very small distance scales. The behavior of exotic subatomic particles that exist at these scales—quarks, gluons, leptons, vector bosons—forms the basis for our understanding of all matter and of the universe in the earliest stages of its formation. Professor Hertzog's research contribution has been his remarkably creative work on the pieces of the Standard Model of particle physics, where he has made an international name for himself as an innovator and a leader.

Professor Hertzog has pioneered new opportunities for research, both in identifying new measurements and exploring new measurement techniques. Examples of his creativity include his idea of searching for the formation of the ξ (2220) in the pbar-p reaction using the hyperon production apparatus at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN, in the development of his Pb/SCIFI calorimetry using scintillating fiber technology, and most recently, in a new experiment (µLAN) to measure the muon lifetime to a precision of 1ppm or better, a staggering 20-fold improvement over the state of the art.

In addition to his outstanding research achievements, Professor Hertzog is a superb teacher. He is the 1994 winner of the W.M. Keck Foundation Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, the 1993 Everitt Award for Teaching Excellence, the 1997 AMOCO Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, and he is a regular on the annual Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked Excellent by their Students and the College of Engineering's Best Advisor lists. Student comments such as "No doubt the best professor I've had at the university, which is shocking considering I hated physics" are routine.

Finally, despite heavy research demands from an extramural experimental program that requires considerable time away from campus and his leadership in the physics curriculum revision, Professor Hertzog has taken a very active role in the department's outreach program to enhance public scientific literacy. He introduced a "discovery room" to Physics 140 in 1993 and expanded it in 1994, creating novel, hands-on devices and demonstrations to teach basic physical science principles to non-science majors. He also initiated and ran our Saturday Physics Honors Program in 1994 and 1995. Now in its eighth year, this popular program is a series of lectures on modern aspects of the physical sciences.

Professor Hertzog joins Physics colleagues Tony M. Liss (1999) and Dale J. Van Harlingen (1998), our most recent University Scholars.