Dr. Milind Purohit

Dr. Milind Purohit is an experimental particle physicist with research, teaching, and leadership experience on many experiments and in an administrative context at several institutions. These include the California Institute of Technology, Fermilab, Princeton University, and the University of South Carolina. His professional interest has been in the study of charm and bottom quarks as well as in the physics of neutrinos. He has been co-spokesperson of a major experiment at Fermilab (E791) for over 15 years, has participated in and chaired university-wide committees at South Carolina, and chaired the Department of Physics and Astronomy there for five years. In the year 2012, he was part of a team that published evidence of the only predicted but unseen fundamental particle that had yet to be observed: the Higgs boson. As a student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in the early 1970s, Purohit completed undergraduate and Master’s work that continued with his work at Caltech. At Fermilab he computed the effects of another significant fundamental particle, the gluon, in photon-hadron interactions and collected and studied data to determine the spin of the gluon, which is fundamental to the Standard Model.