Peter Fisher, the Thomas A. Frank (1977) Professor of Physics, was appointed Associate Vice President for Research in October 2022. He also serves as head of MIT’s newly established Office of Research Computing and Data. Fisher served as head of the Department of Physics from 2013 to 2022 and led the Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics Division from 2002 to 2013.

Fisher holds appointments in MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Fisher is primarily involved in CERN’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment, which is designed to make high-precision measurements of cosmic rays. His primary physics interests are dark matter and high-energy interactions, and he is also interested in the development of new particle detectors.

Fisher received a B.S. in engineering physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1988 obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology. He was also on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University from 1989 to 1994. Since then, he has published numerous papers on neutrinos and the search for what cosmic rays are made of. Professor Peter Fisher’s main activities are the experimental detection of dark matter using a new kind of detector with directional sensitivity and understanding the weak interactions using tau decays detector with the BaBar detector. His other projects include neutrino physics, wireless power transfer, pedagogical work on electromagnetic radiation and development of new kinds of particle detectors.