Wick Haxton

Who is Wick Haxton?

Wick C. Haxton is an American theoretical nuclear physicist and astrophysicist.

Haxton grew up in Santa Cruz, studied from 1967 at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received his doctorate in 1976 at Stanford University. From 1975 to 1977 he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the University of Mainz and then until 1984 as Oppenheimer Fellow in the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After a year as Assistant Professor at Purdue University in 1984 he became Associate Professor and in 1987 Professor at the University of Washington. He remained there as Professor of Physics and Astronomy until 2009, serving from 1991 to 2006 as director of the National Institute for Nuclear Theory. In 2009 he left the University of Washington to become Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley and Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Haxton is engaged in nuclear astrophysics, neutrino physics, many-body theory in nuclear physics, and tests of symmetries of fundamental interactions. He led the early efforts to convert the Homestake Mine in South Dakota to scientific use as the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, but left the project after the mine was flooded in 2003. He has been a consultant for Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, TRIUMF, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and various other laboratories and university facilities over the past two decades.