Peter Parker

Professor of Physics and Astronomy
 

Peter Parker, B.A., Amherst College, Ph.D., Caltech, faculty member at Yale since 1966, for 48 years you have brought your skills as a nuclear physicist and your superb citizenship to your work and life at Yale.

From the beginning of your career in the early 1960’s, you have studied nuclear processes that produce energy in the sun and other stars. You have been one of the leaders in the study of solar neutrinos, and your work, in collaboration with your colleagues, has proved that neutrinos undergo “neutrino oscillations” and change their nature when travelling from the sun to Earth, a discovery that upended our understanding of the fundamental properties of particles and forces. You have also made important contributions to the study of explosive nucleosynthesis, one of the processes through which heavy elements—the atoms of which we are all made—are formed. And you are currently involved in another study of astrophysical interest, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment that searches for the elusive particles of Dark Matter.

The largest part of your experiments have been carried out at the Yale Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory, which you helped make one of the leading laboratories in the World for studies in Nuclear Structure Physics and Nuclear Astrophysics. You were first the associate director and then the director of the Laboratory and there you led the Ph.D. Theses of 26 students on nuclear studies with astrophysical implications, many of them now in leading positions in universities and laboratories worldwide. Among your many services to the Physics department, you were a DUS for two long terms quite far apart—from 1973 - 1984 and from 2007 – 2013. In several cases you were a wonderful adviser to students in the 1970s and then—to everyone’s delight—a superb adviser to their sons and daughters in this past decade.
 
What can we begin to say about you as a Yale citizen? Perhaps that this faculty owes you the warmest vote of thanks we can possibly manage. You were chair of the FAS Review committee from 2008 - 2013 and—perhaps even more significantly—a member of the Yale College Sexual Harassment Grievance Board from 1987 - 2011—nearly a quarter of a century. According to all who worked with you on the Grievance Board, you displayed there the very best qualities of mind and heart: you were principled, firm, judicious, and operated with absolute integrity as well as practical good sense and compassion. In so doing you performed a great service for Yale. As you retire to life in a happy new marriage and to spend half a year in California and half a year in New Haven, the Yale faculty cheers and thanks you and hopes we will see you often.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans