David Toback Elected as New CDF Co-Spokesperson
BATAVIA, IL —
The CDF collaboration at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) elected David Toback as co-spokesperson on March 17. The Texas A&M University physics professor will join fellow CDF spokesperson Costas Vellidis in leading the experiment.
Toback began working with the CDF collaboration in 1991, while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. But his CDF connection goes back even before his graduate work. Toback has known CDF physicists and mentors Henry Frisch and Mel Shochet since high school and graduated with Shochet’s oldest son from the University of Chicago Laboratory High School.
“CDF has been good to me throughout my life and career,” Toback said.
The CDF experiment is no longer collecting new data, so the role of the spokesperson has changed over time, Toback said. He wants to ensure that the group maintains a paper review process as strong as it has always been in the past, so CDF can continue to produce high-quality publications. The collaboration has a 400-person active author list.
“My primary goal is to help support authors so they can publish the important legacy papers,” he said. “This includes measurements of the top mass, the W mass, the single top cross sections and the final word on the top forward-backward asymmetry.”
Toback will replace outgoing co-spokesperson Luciano Ristori beginning June 1.
“I have huge shoes to fill — CDF owes him an enormous amount of gratitude,” Toback said.
“Dave’s enthusiasm and persistence is exactly what we need to make sure we finish publishing all our final legacy results in a timely fashion,” Ristori said.
Toback is currently the Thaman Professor as well as a member of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M. On CDF, he serves as co-convener of the Top + Beyond the Standard Model Group. Toback led the team that built the timing system for the CDF electromagnetic calorimeter, an important upgrade for Tevatron Run II. He is the author of the textbook “Big Bang, Black Holes, No Math.”
Texas A&M has been involved in CDF since its inception, courtesy of co-founders Peter McIntyre and Robert Webb. Three additional Texas A&M professors — Ricardo Eusebi, Teruki Kamon and Alexei Safonov — played lead roles in Run II.
For more information on Texas A&M Collider Physics, go to http://collider.physics.tamu.edu/.
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Contact: Shana K. Hutchins, (979) 862-1237 or David Toback, toback@tamu.edu
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