Aaron Roodman, Ph. D.
West 1981
Aaron Roodman is an associate professor of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford University, where he studies elementary particles at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He is recognized by the international scientific community as an authority on matterantimatter asymmetries in fundamental particles.
With a consortium of over 550 scientists from around the world, called the BABAR collaboration, Roodman searches for answers to the question: where did all the antimatter in the universe go? His research has been focused on finding differences between matter and antimatter that may explain why the universe is made up of matter, not antimatter, and why the universe has any matter at all.
Roodman’s research has yielded many discoveries, including the discovery of a new kind of matterantimatter asymmetry in decays of the K-meson, the first observation of a matter-antimatter asymmetry in the B-meson, and the observation of the very rare decay of a B-meson to two pi-zero mesons.
He is a frequent presenter at seminars and colloquia for physicists around the world, giving talks in Korea, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, France, Switzerland and Italy as well as across the U.S. He has been interviewed by The New York Times on the blind analysis method, and with collaborators has published over four hundred journal papers in particle physics.
In 1985, Roodman earned a B.S. degree (with honors) in physics from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. His graduate studies were conducted at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1991. After post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, he moved to Stanford in 1998.
He is grateful for the excellent education he received at Parkway schools, and wishes to thank the many dedicated teachers he had at Pierremont Elementary, South Jr. High and West Sr. High.
In addition to his career at Stanford, Roodman coaches for his daughter’s soccer team. He, his wife Eva, and their three daughters reside in Stanford, Calif.