Howard Georgi

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Howard Mason Georgi III, born in 1947 in San Bernardino, California, is Harvard College Professor and Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Physics and Master of Leverett House. He has, for many years, taught an advanced freshman physics course, "Physics 16" in the fall semester. As master of Leverett house, he asks all students to endearingly call him "Chief," while his wife Ann Georgi commands the name "Coach." He graduated from Harvard in 1967 and obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1971. He was Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1973-1976 and a Senior Fellow from 1982-1998. In 1995 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the Sakurai Prize; in 2000 he shared the Dirac Medal with Jogesh Pati and Helen Quinn. He has advised a number of notable students, including Andy Cohen, Adam Falk, Benjamin Grinstein, John Hagelin, Lawrence Hall, David B. Kaplan, Michael Luke, Aneesh Manohar, Ann Nelson and Lisa Randall.

He is best known for early work in Grand Unification and gauge coupling unification within SU(5) and SO(10) groups (see Georgi-Glashow model). He later proposed the supersymmetric Standard Model with Savas Dimopoulos in 1981. After the measurements of the three Standard Model gauge couplings at LEP I in 1991, it was shown that particle content of the MSSM, in contrast to the Standard Model alone, led to precision gauge coupling unification.

He has since worked on several different areas of physics including composite Higgs models, heavy quark effective theory, dimensional deconstruction, and little Higgs theories.

Georgi has been a strong advocate for women in science.

Georgi in 2006 together with Vadim Alexeevich Kuzmin received the Pomeranchuk Prize of the Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP).