People Directory


Nina Byers

Nina Byers
Professor Emeritus
Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics

Office: 3-116 Knudsen
Phone: (310) 825-3588
E-Mail: [javascript protected email address]

Educational Background: 
  • B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1950; highest honors
  • M.S., University of Chicago, 1953
  • Ph.D., Chicago, 1956
  • M.A., University of Oxford, 1967
Positions Held: 

Academic Appointments

  • 1993- Research Professor and Professor emeritus on recall, University of California at Los Angeles.
  • 1961-1993 Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Physics, University of California at Los Angeles.
  • 1972-73 Science Research Council Senior Scientist, University of Oxford.
  • 1968-73 Joint appointment: Professor of Physics at University of California at Los Angeles;  Janet Watson Visiting Fellow of Somerville College, and Faculty Lecturer, Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford.
  • 1967-68 Official Fellow and Tutor in Physics, Somerville College, Oxford; Faculty Lecturer, Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, England.
  • 1964-65 Member, School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
  • 1958-61 Research Associate and Assistant Professor, Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
  • 1956-58 Research Fellow, Department of Mathematical Physics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England
  • 2002-2005 Vice-president, President-elect, President, and Past President of the Forum on History of Physics of the American Physical Society.

Appointments

  • John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow (1964-65)
  • Official Fellow and Tutor in Physics, Somerville College, Oxford. (1967-1968)
  • Janet Watson Visiting Fellow and Tutor in Physics, Somerville College, Oxford. (1968-72)
  • Science Research Council Visiting Fellow, University of Oxford. (1978 and 1985)

Honorary Fellowships

  • Fellow of American Physical Society. (APS)
  • Fellow of American Association of the Advancement of Science. (AAAS)
Research Interest: 

In the recent past, research interests have been in heavy quark physics and bound state theory. My students and I have done research on both QCD and QED bound states; i.e., quarkonium and positronium, muonium, etc.. A recent publication summarizing the QCD work is an article in Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, N. Brambilla and G. M. Prosperi, ed.; World Scientific, Singapore, 1995 entitled "Threshold Production of Charmed and B Mesons in e+e- Annihilations."

More recent work has been in general relativity.

Prof. Byers works on history of physics having done research recently on the contributions of 20th century women to physics. See electronic archive on the World Wide Web at http://cwp.library.ucla.edu and/or by clicking on the hyperlink provided here.

She has written on the scientists' role in the 1945 decision to use atomic bombs in the war against Japan. In addition to this paper see also her presentation on Fermi and Szilard at the University of Chicago Reunion on the Centennial of Enrico Fermi's Birth.

Selected Publications: 

View a list of selected recent publications