Stephen Jacob Sekula

Stephen Jacob Sekula is a Professor of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada and currently serves as the Research Group Manager at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada. SNOLAB is the cleanest and deepest scientific laboratory in the world. At 6800ft below the Earth's surface, the lab is home to over a dozen experiments. Many are focused on Stephen's current interests: the nature of dark matter and the use of the neutrino as an astronomical tool. He was formerly a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, TX, USA and Chair of the Department of Physics at SMU. While at SMU he served as Department Chair of Physics and the Altshuler Distinguish Teaching Award, its highest distinction for tenured faculty.

Raised in Connecticut, Stephen was nurtured by an outstanding family and educated in the public school system. He earned a B.S. in physics from Yale University and later a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2008, he led the team within the BaBar Experiment that discovered the lowest-energy arrangement of a bottom quark and its anti-matter counterpart, an elusive state of matter predicted to exist in 1977. He contributed to the ATLAS Experiment team tasked with discovering and studying the Higgs Boson, whose observation on July 4, 2012 was a global event. Since then, he has participated in additional discoveries about the Higgs particle, including its challenging decay to the second-heaviest building block of nature, the bottom quark. He is now focused on particle astrophysics at SNOLAB.