Prof. Peter Fisher
Peter Fisher, the Thomas A. Frank (1977) Professor of Physics, was appointed associate provost and 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, where he led the Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics Division.
Fisher has extensive experience in classical and quantum electrodynamics, including carrying out the most precise tests of the theory, and has over 300 publications in the field. He has also served as an expert witness in court cases related to electromagnetism. He has led a DARPA study of wireless energy transmission between spacecraft as part of the System F6 program, and is a founder of WiTricity, a startup developing wireless energy transmission for commercial use.
He has taught electromagnetism at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and was an instructor for the MIT Physics Undergraduate Laboratory, which includes several components related to electromagnetic radiation. Fisher serves as a referee for several journals, including Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, and Nuclear Instruments and Methods. He served on several national panels and advisory groups, including the Particle Physics Program Prioritization Panel that defined the roadmap for experimental particle physics over 10 years, encompassing about $8 billion in research funds from the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.
His research interests are the experimental detection of dark matter and the development of new kinds of particle detectors. He carried out one of the first dark matter searches and since then has searched for dark matter on Earth and in space, including inventing a new kind of detector, the Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber. He recently published a book, What is Dark Matter?, with Princeton University Press.
Peter Fisher received a bachelor of science in engineering physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983 and a PhD in physics from Caltech in 1988.