Mark Brian Wise

Mark B. Wise is the John A. McCone Professor of High Energy Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (1980-83). Wise has conducted research in elementary particle physics and cosmology. Much of his research has focused on the nature and implications of the symmetries of the strong and weak interactions. While still a graduate student, Wise wrote several highly influential papers on experimental predictions of the quark model. He is best known for his role in the development of heavy quark effective theory (HQET), a mathematical formalism that has allowed physicists to make predictions about otherwise intractable problems in the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. He has also published work on mathematical models for finance and risk assessment. In 2001 Wise received the American Physical Society's J.J. Sakurai Prize "for the construction of the heavy quark mass expansion and the discovery of the heavy quark symmetry in quantum chromodynamics, which led to a quantitative theory of the decays of c and b flavored hadrons."