Michael Strickland

Michael Strickland is a theoretical physicist who specializes in high-energy particle physics. Michael received his BS in physics from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1992 and his PhD in physics from Duke University in 1997. Since then Michael has held multiple research positions and fellowships: Ohio State University, University of Washington (Seattle), Duke University, Vienna Technical University (Austria), Helsinki Institute for Theoretical Physics (Finland), Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (Germany), and the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University - Institute for Theoretical Physics (Germany). Michael started at Gettysburg College in the Fall of 2008. He continues to work with the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies as an Adjunct Fellow helping them to guide their theoretical program.

Michael's primary interest is the physics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). These plasmas are predicted by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to have existed up to about 10^(-6) seconds after the big bang and are currently being studied terrestrially by experimentalists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Labs and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The RHIC experiments have already shown evidence for the creation of a QGP and theorists and experimentalists expect the firm evidence to fall into place when the LHC's ultrarelativistic heavy-ion runs begin in 2010. This exciting new experiment will increase our knowledge of the behavior of matter under extreme conditions.

As of September 2009 Michael has published 56 research papers and has received over 1500 citations of his work. In addition Michael is the author of a popular book on neural networks called Neural Networks: An Introduction.