Patricia Burchat

Concerned citizen, Educator/Teacher, Foodie, Parent, Scientist

Patricia Burchat enjoys her role as Chair of the Physics Department at Stanford University. When she finds time for research, she studies differences in the time evolution of matter and antimatter with the international BABAR Collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She also studies the gravitational "lensing" of light by massive clusters of galaxies. Prof. Burchat was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005/2006. She was appointed a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education in 2004, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001. She was recently awarded the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, which is Stanford University's highest teaching honor. Patricia Burchat grew up in a small town in Canada. She graduated from the Engineering Science program at the University of Toronto in 1981 and then went to graduate school at Stanford University where she received her PhD in experimental particle physics in 1986. She was a postdoctoral research associate and then an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, before returning to the Physics Department at Stanford University in 1995. Two years ago, Prof. Burchat worked with the School of Engineering at Stanford to introduce an Engineering Physics major, modeled after programs like the Engineering Science major at U of Toronto. Prof. Burchat has two children, the older of whom is an Engineering Physics student at Stanford. Her younger son sings and acts at Gunn High School in Palo Alto and builds things in his spare time. Her husband is a neuroscientist.

Teaching, education, scientific thinking, effecting positive change.