Joel Fajans is a Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1985 under George Bekefi for research on free electron lasers.
Before moving to Berkeley in 1988, Fajans studied non-neutral plasmas at UC San Diego under John Malmberg.
At Berkeley, Fajans studied basic plasma physics, two-dimensional fluid dynamics, and non-linear systems.
In 2005, he joined the ALPHA collaboration at CERN, which is devoted to trapping antihydrogen, with the ultimate intention of testing CPT and the interaction between gravity and antimatter.
The ALPHA collaboration reported the first ever trapped antihydrogen in November 2010.
Fajans has an alternative life as an occasional popular lecturer on the physics of bicycles and an expert witness on the question of whether or not electricity exists.
Professor Fajans is a fellow of the American Physical Society.Ê His Ph.D. thesis, partially funded by a Hertz fellowship, received the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award Recipient in plasma physics from the American Physical Society.
He has been an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, an ONR Young Investigator, and a Miller and Sloan Fellow.
The University of Texas at Austin