Zvi Bern receives the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour, 2024

Zvi Bern received his BSc from MIT, and his PhD from University of California at Berkeley in 1986. His first post-doctoral position was at the Niels Bohr Institute (1986-1988) and he subsequently held post-doctoral positions at Los Alamos and University of Pittsburg before joining faculty at UCLA, where he has been since.

In 2016 he was the driving force behind the establishing of the Mani Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics UCLA for which he is the founding Director.

One of the most remarkable of his scientific achievements, the invention of the method of unitarity-based rules for calculating scattering amplitudes at loop level in quantum field theory, was, in fact initiated during Zvi Bern’s postdoctoral period at the Niels Bohr Institute.

Today generalized unitarity underlies all front-level calculations for the Standard Model of particle physics being tested at LHC at CERN. Furthermore, Zvi Bern is the father of the double copy idea for Yang Mills and gravity amplitudes which has numerous times made it possible to break new boundaries in the understanding of the finiteness properties of supergravity.

In recent years Zvi Bern has become a leading figure in the analytical computation of gravitational wave behaviour.

Zvi Bern has received several honorary distinctions, including a Sloan Fellowship at young age, the J.J. Sakurai Prize from the American Physical Society, a Simon Foundation Fellowship, a Moore Fellowship, and the Galilieo Galilei Medal from INFN in Italy. In addition, he has been elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S.