Eugene Chiang (Ph.D., Caltech, 2000) joins the Departments of Astronomy and Earth and Planetary Science as an Assistant Professor from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies where he was a postdoctoral researcher. Although trained in astrophysics, Chiang specializes in planet and star formation. His research areas include the physical structure and the spectra of disks of gas and dust in orbit around very young stars. He works with the Center for Integrative Planetary Science at Berkeley.

Eliot Quataert (Ph.D., Harvard, 1999) comes to the Astronomy Department as an Assistant Professor from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study where he has been a postdoctoral researcher. Quataert works in the astrophysics of black holes and accretion onto compact objects and he is interested in planetary and solar physics. He has also been active in several observational aspects of disks in galactic nuclei.

Chung-Pei Ma (Ph.D., MIT, 1993) is a new Associate Professor in the Astronomy Department. She was formerly an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Ma's 'astronomical' teaching skills were recognized by Penn's Lindback Award for teaching, usually given to more senior faculty. Her research focuses on problems in theoretical cosmology with close ties to observations. Ma's research topics range from dark matter and the cosmic microwave background to the large-scale structure of the universe. She is an accomplished violinist.

Jill Banfield (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins, 1990) joins Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management as a Professor. Her research spans the three fields of mineralogy, environmental geochemistry, and geomicrobiology. Banfield studies interactions between microorganisms and minerals, especially the impact of microorganisms on mineral weathering and crystal growth, biomineralization, and geochemical cycling. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999.

Mark Haiman (Ph.D., MIT, 1984) comes to Berkeley's Mathematics Department as a Professor from UC San Diego. He does research in algebraic combinatorics. Haiman's recent work on the n-factorial conjecture and the MacDonald Positivity Conjecture has made him very visible in the math community. He is regarded as an excellent teacher on the San Diego campus. Haiman was a Visiting Miller Research Professor at Berkeley in 2000.

Lior Pachter (Ph.D., MIT, 1999) works in applied and computational mathematics. He has made notable contributions to combinatorics, including a significant improvement in the Erdos-Szekers problem. The thrust of his current work in bio-informatics is to develop mathematical tools for identifying genes from the other material in the genome. Pachter, who has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Berkeley since 1999, joins the Mathematics Department as an Assistant Professor.

Daniel Tataru (Ph.D., University of Virginia, 1992) is a mathematician whose work focuses on partial differential equations and their applications to physical science. He has made many fundamental contributions to different parts of the subject, especially non-linear evolution. Tataru's field is the study of hyperbolic equations that describe various forms of wave propagation. He joins the Mathematics Department from Northwestern University as a Professor.

Ori Ganor (Ph.D., Tel Aviv University, 1996) is a creative string theorist with a broad knowledge of quantum field theory, modern mathematics and general relativity. He comes to the Department of Physics as an Associate Professor. Professor Ganor has been an Assistant Professor at Princeton where he was very successful as a graduate research supervisor.

Petr Horava (Ph.D., Czech Academy of Sciences, 1991) is a string theorist whose research publications have received wide acclaim, having been cited 2200 times. His thesis contained the first discovery of D-branes, a subject that has in large part dominated string theory during recent years. His research focuses on understanding the structure of the string theory and searching for its relations to other areas of modern physics. Horava joins the faculty of the Physics Department as an Associate Professor from Rutgers University.

Joel Moore (Ph.D., MIT, 2000) joins the Physics Department as an Assistant Professor from Bell Labs where he was a postdoctoral researcher. His main interest is strongly correlated condensed matter systems. Moore's work explaining the magnetic field induced splitting of the Kondo resonance has had a strong impact on the fields of mesoscopic physics and correlated electron systems. Currently he is working on the physics of zero-, one-, and two-dimensional correlated electron systems, especially as revealed in nonequilibrium measurements, and on a self-consistent theory of the quantum Hall plateau transition.

Martin White (Ph.D., Yale, 1992) is a new Professor in the Physics Department and was formerly an Associate Professor at Harvard. He is a theoretical cosmologist who has specializes in studies of the Cosmic Microwave background. White has had a significant impact on the design and implementation of experiments in cosmology. He is considered to be an excellent teacher at both the undergraduate and graduate level.