Mikhail Solon Will Be Joining the Department

We are delighted that Dr. Mikhail Solon will be joining the Mani L. Bhaumik Insitute as a new faculty member in the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy. Dr. Solon is an expert on effective field theory, having made major contributions to a broad set of areas including the study of dark matter, the large-scale structure of the universe, the physics of particle colliders and gravitational-wave physics. Dr. Solon¹s most impressive work to date is his very recent development and execution of a formalism, together with his collaborators, of high-precision theoretical calculations for gravitational waves from coalescing black-hole binary systems. His work simultaneously broadens the Institute and offers important synergy with the existing program, especially on scattering amplitudes and the double-copy construction which offers a unified framework for gauge and gravity theories.

Dr. Solon received a B.S. in Physics at University of the Philippines in 2009, where he won various awards including Project of the Year in 2009 and Outstanding Student in 2009. He then went on to the University of Chicago graduate program where he continued to thrive, winning multiple fellowships and grants. For his graduate work he received the J.J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics from the American Physical Society. This is the highest honor for PhD work awarded by the American Physical Society in theoretical particle physics. He then went on to a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley. In 2017 he became a McCone Fellow at the Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech.