Wick Haxton, a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Theory Program in the Nuclear Science Division (NSD), and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Haxton joined the NSD in 2009, coming from the University of Washington, where he directed the Institute for Nuclear Theory for 15 years. His research interests include neutrino and nuclear astrophysics, low-energy tests of fundamental symmetries such as time reversal, parity, and lepton number, and various applications of many-body theory. Much of his work is motivated by experiment. He recently worked with the Baksan Experiment on Sterile Neutrinos (BEST) collaboration on interpretations of their sterile neutrino experiment. With UC Berkeley colleagues Evan Rule and Kenneth McElvain, and others, he developed an effective theory of muon-to-electron conversion, a probe of flavor violation among the charged leptons. Fermilab and KEK are currently mounting searches for this rare process, and Rule (Haxton’s student) was awarded this year’s American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics dissertation award for contributions to this work. Haxton directs UC Berkeley’s Physics Frontier Center N3AS, which focuses on multi-messenger astrophysics. He was previously elected to fellowship in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society.

The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge,” is unusual among learned societies because its membership is composed of scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Today, it has 976 elected members from more than two dozen countries. New members are elected annually and supported with opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship through grants and fellowships, lectures, publications, prizes, exhibitions, public education, and a research library of manuscripts and other collections internationally recognized for their historical value.