David MacFarlane

Dr. MacFarlane’s is a researcher is in the field of experimental particle physics. He received his  Ph.D. from Caltech in 1984 and ubsequently has been involved as a collaborator in a succession of particle physics experiments, including CCFR at Fermilab, ARGUS at DESY, CLEO-II at Cornell, BABAR at SLAC, and SCDMS at SNOLAB. His work at SNOLAB included participation in one of the major discoveries in the field (mixing in the neutral B meson system) in the late 1980s. He also rose to some prominence in the international community as the spokesperson of a 600-person international scientific collaboration (BABAR), pursuing the large asymmetry between the matter and antimatter content of the present day universe, one of the mysteries of modern day cosmology. Over the course of his active research career, Dr. MacFarlane held positions as a faculty member in the Physics Departments at McGill University (1987-1997) and the University of California at San Diego (1997-2005) before joining the faculty at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in 2005.

Over the past decade, Dr. MacFarlane has held several leadership and management positions at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, including Associate Laboratory Director (2009-2015) for the Particle Physics and Astrophysics Directory, and Chief Research Officer (2015-2017), a member of the Director’s staff charged with developing processes and long-range strategic planning for the laboratory.

Given this background, Dr. MacFarlane has served on many advisory bodies in the field, including seven years as the Chair of the NRC Advisory Committee on TRIUMF (2010-2017), a period as Chair of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Committee (2016-2018), the primary advisory body to the Director of Fermilab on its ambitious $1.6B proposal to build a world-leading underground research facility for neutrinos at SURF. He also served as the Chair of the Executive Board (2012-2019) of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation (LSSTC), a not-for-profit corporation formed to raise funding for development of LSST as a US$700M NSF and DOE project and to prepare the science community to exploit is multi-hundred Petabyte survey data set.