Public Biography
Dr. Helene Marquardt is a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University, where she holds the Enrico Fermi Chair in Particle Theory. Her research focuses on quantum field theory, gauge symmetry, and the mathematical structure of the Standard Model. She has published more than ninety peer-reviewed papers and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Dr. Marquardt received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 and completed postdoctoral work at CERN before joining the Columbia faculty in 2006. She was part of the theoretical team whose predictions were confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, an achievement she has described as “gratifying, though I would note that the particle did all the hard work of existing.”
She is the author of Symmetry and Structure: An Introduction to Gauge Theory for the Curious (Oxford University Press, 2018), which was intended as a popular science book but which reviewers noted “becomes impenetrable by page forty, at which point Dr. Marquardt appears to forget she is not writing for graduate students.”
Dr. Marquardt lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and serves on the advisory board of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.