Heidi Schellman

• Member, FRA Board of Directors for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
• Professor of Physics, Northwestern University

Heidi Schellman studies the strong and weak interactions of quarks and leptons. She is working on several experimental projects at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory:

* The NuTeV experiment scatters neutrinos and antineutrinos from a 680-ton iron target. Recent results, for which Schellman's student Geralyn "Sam" Zeller received the 2003 Tanaka Dissertation Award from the American Physical Society, compared the weak couplings of the W and Z vector bosons.

* The Fermilab D0 experiment collides protons and antiprotons at the highest energies currently available. The experiment's highlights have included the discovery of the top quark, probably the last of the fundamental spin-½ particles left to discover. Her main scientific interest in this experiment is the novel strong and weak interaction effects that can be discovered in an experiment at such high energies.

Graduate students working with Schellman on D0 are studying the production and decay of weak vector bosons. Such studies can reveal the mass and decay with of the W boson and the weak couplings of quarks. They also provide information on the strong interactions and the quark content of the proton.

She is also interested in future high-intensity neutrino experiments and the relation between cosmology and high-energy physics.