January 2, 2020 – Jacob “Jake” Martin Pasner, a 2009 graduate from Nevada Union High School, has earned a PhD in Physics from the University of California Santa Cruz for his work with the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. Jake earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics from UC Davis in 2013 where he earned the Physics Department Top Student award. He also earned a Master’s degree in Physics from UC Santa Cruz in 2015.
Jake conducted research on site with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland from September 2015 – March 2017. Jake worked with international ATLAS collaborators and studied the smallest interactions of this Universe using the largest experiment ever constructed.
Pasner’s PhD dissertation, “The Search for Boosted Higgs Bosons Decaying to bb” analyzed data from ATLAS, using one of the largest computational networks in the world. Dr. Pasner successfully defended his dissertation on October 31, 2019.
Earlier this year Pasner was invited to give a talk at the United States Large Hadron Collider Users Association’s annual meeting in Chicago and to travel to Washington, D.C. to talk with Congress about his research. He was featured in a Symmetry Magazine article published in January 2019 (https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-farmer-physicist). He served as an intern in Congressman Jimmy Panetta’s office last spring.
Dr. Pasner is the son of Mike Pasner of Indian Springs Organic Farm in Penn Valley and Izzy Martin, former Nevada County Supervisor and current CEO of The Sierra Fund.