# Gail G. Hanson

Gail G. Hanson received her B.S. degree in physics in 1968 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She began work in experimental particle physics as an undergraduate. She received her Ph.D. degree in 1973 also from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for research on the electron-positron collider at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator at Harvard University. She did postdoctoral research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), working on the SPEAR electron-positron storage ring, where she contributed to the discoveries of the J/$\psi$ particle and the $\tau$ lepton and independently discovered quark jets in 1975, for which she was awarded the American Physical Society’s W. K. H. Panofsky Prize. Hanson continued in staff physicist positions at SLAC until 1989, when she moved to Indiana University to become a Professor of Physics. In 1997, she became a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University. She continued research on electron-positron physics on the PEP storage ring and the SLAC Linear Collider at SLAC and on the OPAL experiment at the LEP electron-positron collider at CERN, where she served as Physics Coordinator and contributed to $b$-quark hadron discoveries and searches for new particles. In 2002, she moved to the University of California, Riverside, as a Distinguished Professor of Physics. Hanson now carries out research on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and on development of a future ${\mu }^{+}\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}{\mu }^{-}$ collider. Hanson was elected a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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## Searching for the Higgs

Published December 14, 2009
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider are at the start of a challenging hunt for the Higgs boson, a particle thought to confer the property of mass on every other particle.