Internationally renowned physicist named Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University – Florida State University News

High energy physics or particle physics is concerned with the discovery and properties of the basic components of matter and their interactions. Prosper was actively involved in four major discoveries: the first direct evidence of gluons, the top quark, the electroweak production of a single top quark, and the Higgs boson.

Todd Adams, professor of physics, wrote in his nomination letter that while the last three were discovered through large-scale collaborations with hundreds or thousands of collaborators, Prosper was not only a member of the collaboration but the discovery Work leader.

The discovery of the Higgs boson was of particular importance to Prosper.

Scientists Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs independently proposed the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle that provides mass to electrons and other particles. But this was not confirmed until 2012, when Prosper and his colleagues at CERN discovered physical evidence of the particle.

Adams wrote, I am not aware of any physicist of his generation (or younger) who has such a record of discovery.

Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emeritus Kirby W. Kemper, who helped hire Prosper in the early 1990s, wrote that Prosper repeatedly met the criteria for the Lawton Award . In 2006, Prosper became the Kirby W. Kemper Professor of Physics. The professorship was endowed by the Kempers family in 2016.

Kemper expressed his appreciation for Prosper’s election in 2019 to serve a two-year term as chair of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration Committee at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Kemper wrote that this is a huge recognition because CMS is a huge collaboration that includes more than 4,000 scientists and engineers from more than 50 countries.

As Chairman, he oversees many aspects of the CMS experiment, a role that requires around-the-clock management of the different teams that contribute to the project.

Kemper wrote that his almost biweekly flights to Geneva, Switzerland, would be exhausting for any of us, but he accomplished the endeavor with typical diplomacy.

Prosper also served on the High Energy Physics Advisory Group and its regular group P5 (Particle Physics Project Prioritization Group). Members of these groups are appointed by leaders at the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation and provide advice on various aspects of high energy physics policy.

Prosperity Teaching and research are intertwined, whether he is teaching high school students in Florida State University’s Young Scholars Program, teaching undergraduates or supervising their research, or mentoring graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

“What I love most is interacting with young people because not only are they the future, but there’s always a sense that you might actually make a difference in someone’s life, which makes it all worth it,” Prosper said.

Adams praised Prospers’ teaching: Harrison is one of the best teachers at Florida State University because he cares deeply about student learning. … He and I would have multiple conversations every semester about how we could improve our courses, and I knew I would always come up with a new idea or two.

At the university level, Prosper currently serves as a member of the Presidential and Rhodes Scholarship Committees, the University Promotion and Tenure Committee, and the Distinguished Research Professors Committee, and serves as chair of the Research Computing Management Committee.

He also received letters of nomination from colleagues at Imperial College London, UCLA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The Lawton Distinguished Professor Award was first awarded in 1957 as the Distinguished Professor Award. In 1981, the college was renamed in honor of the late Robert O. Lawton, vice president for academic affairs. .