The Darrell and Elaine Long Professorship in Experimental Physics
Elaine and I endowed the Darrell D. E. Long and Elaine N. Long Family Professorship in Experimental Physics at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Bruce Schumm is its first holder, appointed for 2025–2030. The endowment supports experimental research by a tenured member of the Physics Department.
With Dr. Bruce Schumm, the first holder of the professorship.
Why Experimental Physics
I wanted to be a scientist as a child. Growing up during Apollo, and watching programs such as Mr. Wizard, I was drawn to the possibility of understanding the physical world through experiments. That interest has remained with me throughout my career.
Research Support
I learned the value of flexible research funding as the holder of the Kumar Malavalli chair. It paid for equipment, servers for graduate students, and an administrative assistant who helped several faculty members. That assistance sustained the ordinary work of a research group over many years. Restricted project grants do not cover every need. The professorship gives its holder some of the latitude that made a difference to my own work.
Dr. Schumm works on experimental particle physics and the instruments that make precise measurements possible. His research also reaches into accelerator diagnostics, photon science, and fusion. He has leadership roles in the Advanced Accelerator Diagnostics Collaboration and PIONEER, as the department's description of his appointment explains.
PIONEER, at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, will measure rare pion decays. Its first phase compares how often positive pions decay into positrons and neutrinos with how often they decay into antimuons and neutrinos. The ratio tests whether electrons and muons have the same weak-interaction strength, a property called lepton universality. A discrepancy with the Standard Model would point to physics beyond it.
In the university's October 2025 announcement, Dr. Schumm described support for graduate-student research and travel, and for an undergraduate doing simulations to examine PIONEER's detector design and performance.
Elaine and I
Elaine and I met as children in El Cajon. I fell in love with her when I was nine, although I was too shy to tell her. We went on to lead separate lives, found each other again in 2014, and married in 2016. We endowed the professorship together.
In 2022, Elaine and I established annual UCSC dissertation prizes in both experimental engineering and experimental physics. The first engineering prize went to Dr. Alison Tang for her dissertation on alternative RNA processing in cancers. The physics prize recognizes the best doctoral dissertation in experimental physics; its 2022 recipient was Dr. Patrick LaBarre, whose dissertation concerned topology and the development of an apparatus for measuring non-local conductivity.