Sylvester James Gates

Sylvester James “Jim” Gates, Jr. is a theoretical physicist. He is a University of Maryland University System Regents Professor, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, and a College Park Professor Emeritus. He currently holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science and serves as a Professor of Physics with the Physics Department as well as Affiliate Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. Gates served on the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, contemporaneously on the Maryland State Board of Education from 2009-2016, and the National Commission on Forensic Science from 2013-2016.

From 2017 – 2022 Prof. Gates served as the Brown Theoretical Physics Center Director, Ford Foundation Professor of Physics, Affiliate Mathematics Professor, and a Watson Institute for International Studies & Public Affairs Faculty Fellow at Brown University.

He is known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He received two B.S. degrees and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his doctoral thesis was the institution’s first on the topic of supersymmetry. In 1984, Gates co-authored Superspace, the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry. He is a past president of the National Society of Black Physicists and an NSBP Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics in the U.K. In August 2021 Prof. Gates was the recipient of the 2021 Andrew Gemant Award. In March, 2020 Prof. Gates was elected to the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Board of Trustees. He was elected as a Fellow of the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) beginning May, 2021. In 2019, he was elected to the presidential line of the APS where he is currently serving as Past President. He is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, becoming the first African-American theoretical physicist so recognized in its 150-year history. President Obama awarded Prof. Gates the National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony in 2013.

Throughout 2015-2016 he was in residence at Dartmouth College as the Roth Distinguished Scholar, and during the academic years including 2007 and 2013, he served as the Rydell Visiting Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College. From 1991 – 1993, Professor Gates was the Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Howard University and served as the founding director of the Center for the Study of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Atmospheres (CSTEA) funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. His tenure also saw the inauguration of efforts leading to MHATTCAT (the Michigan/Howard/ AT& T collaborative access team), to carry research at the synchrotron at the Advanced Photon Source in 1994 supported by the Department of Energy.