David J. Gross

Chancellor’s Chair in Theoretical Physics, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics

2004 Nobel Prize in Physics

"For the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction"

Professor Gross first came to UCSB in January 1997, and served as Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics until 2012. Gross shared the Nobel Prize for solving the last great remaining problem of what has since come to be called "the Standard Model" of the quantum mechanical picture of reality, discovering with his co-recipients how the nucleus of an atom works.

Gross received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He spent 31 years on the faculty at Princeton University, where he was Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

His many honors and awards include the J. J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Prize, and France's highest scientific honor, the Grande Médaille D'Or (the Grand Gold Medal).