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Memoir
Gordon L. Kane
Regents' Proceedings
Regents' Proceedings
Gordon L. Kane, Ph.D., Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor of Physics and professor of physics, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, retired from active faculty status on December 31, 2019.
Professor Kane received his B.A. (1958) degree from the University of Minnesota and his M.S. (1961) and Ph.D. (1963) degrees from the University of Illinois. He joined the University of Michigan faculty as an assistant professor in 1965, and was promoted to associate professor in 1969, and professor in 1975. He was named the Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics in 2002 and the Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor of Physics in 2011. He served as director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics from 2005-11.
Professor Kane has had a distinguished career as a leader in connecting new theories of particle physics to experiment. He published over 200 research articles, amassing over 20,000 citations. He was responsible for devising strategies to search for the Higgs boson, and collated these and many other approaches to hunt for this particle in The Higgs Hunter's Guide (1990), a text which helped steer the searches that ultimately led to the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Professor Kane was a leader in connecting supersymmetry, a theory motivated from both string theory and particle theory perspectives, to experimentally verifiable consequences. More broadly, he worked tirelessly to connect string theory to the real world. He authored two books for the general public, including The Particle Garden (1994), which explicates the Standard Model, and Supersymmetry and Beyond (2013), which gives the public a vision of where particle physics may be headed in the future. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics. The American Physical Society awarded him the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize in 2011 and the J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2017.
The Regents now salute this distinguished scholar by naming Gordon L. Kane, Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Physics and professor emeritus of physics.