Prof. Sajjad Alam

Prof. Alam was born on 5 January 1947 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is married with 2 children. He is currently professor of Physics, Albany State University, and director of Albany High Energy Physics Laboratory, New York, USA.

Prof. Alam obtained his PhD, in Experimental Partical Physics, from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, in 1975; his MSc degree, in Theoritical Nuclear Physics, in 1970 from Dhaka University, Bangladesh; and his BSc in Physics from the same university in 1968.

He was a Teaching Assistant at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, 1971 – 1974; Senior Assistant, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1974 – 1975; Research Associate, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, California, 1975 – 1979; Senior Associate, 1979 – 1981, and Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University, 1981 – 1984; and Professor at Sunya, Albany, New York, 1995 – present.

From 1979-2001, he was part of the CLEO collaboration at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. As part of CLEO, he published more than 400 papers in major physics journals and reported the discovery of more than half a dozen new particles. In 2001, the group joined the BaBar experiment at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. This is a major international experiment involving more than 500 physicists. Since 1995, the group has been part of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN (Center European Research Nucleare), Geneva, Switzerland. ATLAS is an international collaboration of 1700 physicists from 35 different countries. The ATLAS detector has been approved to study proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at center-of-mass energies of 14 trillion electron volts (TEV), the highest energy machine to be ready for experiments in 2006.

Prof. Alam received the 2000 Abdus Salam Award for Achievement in Science, awarded by the League of America, and in1993, received the Excellence in Research Award, from University at Albany.

Prof. Alam’s primary field of interest is Experimental Particle Physics, or High Energy Physics. The goal of his field of research is to understand the ultimate structure of matter, space, and time. Data analysis in particle physics is very computer intensive and from this point of view, his secondary interest focuses on all aspects of computer science and engineering.

He is also very interested in semiconductor based particle detectors such as microstrip and pixel tracking chambers. Designing detectors of these kinds brings him to the frontier of materials science, semiconductor devices, and microelectronics engineering.

Alam is interested in exploring new technologies for teaching. At Albany, he has set up a particle detector tower, which uses cosmic rays showering from the sky instead of a particle beam from an accelerator. What is unique about the setup is that it has been instrumented in such a way that it can be accessed from anywhere in the world over the Internet.

Prof. Alam was elected a Fellow of the Islamic Academy of Sciences in 2002.