Ken Bloom

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Ken Bloom

Chairperson Physics & Astronomy University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Contact

Address
JH 258E
Lincoln NE 68588-0299
Phone
402-472-6093 On-campus 2-6093
Email
kenbloom@unl.edu

I am an experimental particle physicist, with interests in top-quark physics, weak interactions, and the Higgs boson. I've done research in particle physics for more than thirty years, ever since I was a college student, and it's an honor to be able to work in a field with such grand questions and international scale. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland started operations in 2009, colliding protons at energies a factor of 3.5 higher than we've ever achieved previously with a particle accelerator. I and other physicists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the LHC. In 2012, we observed a new particle, which as far as we can tell is the long-awaited Higgs boson, the last missing particle of the standard model of particle physics. As a field, we spent fifty years looking for it! My own recent contribution to our knowledge about the Higgs is a search for anomalous production of this particle in association with a single top quark.  The Higgs discovery is great news, but we also expected to see other new particles by now, and we haven't. That's a problem for a lot of proposed models of particle interactions.  After a three year shutdown for maintenance and upgrades, the LHC is starting again and will take data through 2025, providing many scientific opportunties.

Data analysis is the very last step for making a physics measurement.  First we have to build and then operate the experiment.  Operations is a huge task -- there is a scientific instrument the size of a building to maintain and run, and data to process.  I am Deputy Manager of the U.S. CMS Operations Program, which is responsible for the U.S. contributions to the operation of CMS.  In my role, I am the Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundation award that paritally funds the program.  I help oversee the $35M annual budget that funds activities at 45 institutions, and work with other managers and our funding agencies (the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation) to support the work of U.S. physicists on CMS.

Besides the physics of the experiment, I'm also involved in computing issues. CMS produces petabytes of data each year, and it has to be processed, stored, transferred and analyzed. It's a huge computing task, and much of it gets done using facilities here in the United States. In 2015-19, I served as manager of software and computing for the U.S. CMS Operations Program, with responsibility for the $16M annual budget for U.S. CMS computing facilities and support personnel. At Nebraska, we host a so-called "Tier-2" computing center for CMS, where we host data that collaborators from all over the world analyze, and also run the simulations that help us understand what new phenomena might look like. I interact closely with our colleagues at the Holland Computing Center who look after the day-to-day operations of the computers. There are six other sites like ours in the U.S. (at Caltech, Florida, MIT, Purdue, UC San Diego and Wisconsin), and about fifty of them around the world. I spent nearly a decade as the leader of the team that runs the U.S. sites, and I continue to be a co-coordinator of the world-wide program. From this computing work, I've branched out into some other interesting problems in data-intensive high-throughput computing, such as the NSF-funded "Any Data, Anytime, Anywhere" project that made data access over the wide-area network transparent and reliable for users, the DIANA-HEP project that developed innovative software for large-scale data analysis, and the IRIS-HEP software institute that is enabling computational and data science research for the High Luminosity LHC that will begin operations in 2029 (we hope).  Currently we're playing around with developing computing facilities that can handle new paradigms for particle physics data analysis, and that's been fun.

Education

  • AB in Physics from The University of Chicago (1992)
  • MS (1995) and Ph.D. (1997) in Physics from Cornell University

Teaching

I am not scheduled to teach in 2022-23.

In the past I've taught Physics 201 (seminar course directed at freshman physics majors), Physics 212 (introductory calculus-based electromagnetism), Physics 311 (intermediate-level classical mechanics for majors), Physics 441 (advanced experimental laboratory for physics majors), Physics 462 (atomic, nuclear and particle physics for majors) and Physics 926 (graduate-level particle physics).

Service

I have the honor of serving as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

In 2020-22 I served as Faculty Associate to the Chancellor for Budget Model Implementation.  In this role, I helped the university with its transition to an incentive-based budget model.  Our goal is to to transform how the university operates and fully unleash our potential as a research university.  I continue to co-chair the university's new Budget Model Advisory Committee, and I am a member of the College of Arts and Sciences Budget Advisory Committee.

In 2016-22, I was a member of the university Academic Planning Committee, which helps set the academic goals of the university, and also handles changes in academic programs due to budget cuts.  In 2017-18 I was chair of the committee and had a far too large public profile.

In the past I have been chair of the Research Council, chair of the Holland Computing Center Advisory Committee, and a member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln N2025 Strategic Planning Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences Executive Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences Committee on Student Academic Distinction, Awards, and Appeals, the College of Arts and Sciences Research Advisory Committee, and the College of Arts and Sciences Inclusion, Diversity Equity and Access (IDEA) Committee.  

I served as the Chief Undergraduate Adviser for the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and also chair of the department's Undergraduate Committee, from 2012-20.  An undergraduate degree in physics is great training for just about any career!

The particle physics community in the United States has wrapped up one of its occasional "Snowmass" community summer studies.  I co-led a topical group on the social and environmental impacts of particle physics, and was an editor of a white paper on the impacts of particle physics on the earth's climate.  We got a nice writeup about this in symmetry magazine.  I have a seminar/colloquium talk on that if you are interested.

Previously, I was a member of the scientific program committee for the DPF 2015 conference that was held in 2015 (of course!). Earlier, I was a member of the US LHC Users Association Executive Committee in 2013-14, and in 2012-13 I was a subgroup convener for the previous "Snowmass" Community Summer Study.

More About Me

I grew up in South Orange, NJ, and at the time never dreamed that I would live in Nebraska someday. I hold an AB in Physics from The University of Chicago (1992), and an MS (1995) and Ph.D. (1997) in Physics from Cornell University. I was a postdoctoral researcher at The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan before coming to UNL in 2004 as an Assistant Professor; I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009 and then to Professor in 2016. I was on a faculty development leave for the 2013-14 academic year, and I spent my time in residence at CERN. During 2015-20 I was a Visiting Scientist in the Scientific Computing Division at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which is the host laboratory of the U.S. CMS Operations Program. I worked on the CDF experiment at Fermilab in 1989-92 and 1997-2004, the CLEO experiment at Cornell in 1992-97, and the D0 experiment at Fermilab from 2004 until we tire of looking at the data (still publishing now and then!). I am the previous recipient of an NSF Early Career Development Award, and in 2016 I was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2018-19 I was a Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadershp Program Fellow.  I find my job as a university professor to be utterly exhausting but also continually fascinating, and I am very glad to have this opportunity to pursue a wide range of interests.