Walter Alvarez was born in Berkeley, and received his PhD in geology at Princeton.  His thesis research (and honeymoon) was in a roadless desert in Colombia, living with Guajiro Indians and smugglers.  Much of his research has been in Italy, where he worked on archeological and volcanic geology in Rome, on the tectonics of the geologically complex Mediterranean, and on Earth's magnetic reversals recorded in deep-water limestones in the Apennines.   In 1977 he joined the faculty at U.C. Berkeley and, with Luis W. Alvarez, Frank Asaro and Helen V. Michel, began a study of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  Evidence from iridium measurements suggested that the extinction was due to impact on the Earth of a giant asteroid or comet, and many years later that hypothesis was confirmed by the discovery of a huge impact crater, buried beneath the subsurface of the Yucatán Peninsula, dating from precisely the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.   He is currently interested in Big History, the new field that aims to tie everything in our planet's past into a coherent understanding of the grand sweep and character of history. Alvarez has received honorary doctorates from the University of Siena in Italy and the University of Oviedo in the Principality of Asturias in Spain, where his family originated. 

Jerry Anderson received his PhD in experimental high-energy physics from the University of California in 1963.  He participated in the Alvarez group as a scanner-technician, as a graduate student, and as a post-doctoral research physicist at LBL. He was a contributor to a number of major experiments in bubble chamber physics both at LBL and at Brookhaven National Lab, was the American Director of the Pyramid Project to investigate the Egyptian pyramids, and was a leader in the first Alvarez group experiments in Astrophysics and Cosmology.  Subsequently he had a successful business career founding several high technology companies in Silicon Valley.  After retiring from an active business life he planted a small vineyard in Woodside, CA, and continues to operate the associated winery

Angela (Lina) Barbaro Galtieri received her doctoral Degree at the University of Rome. Her thesis was on pion interactions in nuclear emulsion. She was a member of the group of Edoardo Amaldi, who was a student and colleague of Fermi until 1938, when Fermi came to the US. She came to the US in 1961, joining the Barkas group and in 1962 moved to the Alvarez group. She participated in some of the discoveries of the Alvarez group and worked on testing the quark model for many years. She worked in experiments at SLAC (Bubble Chamber, streamer chamber, SPEAR and PEP), including the so-called "Lead Glass Wall" at SPEAR. In this experiment the existence of the tau lepton was confirmed and a new particle, Psi(3772), was discovered. This particle decays into a pair of charmed particles, thus allowing studies of the charmed quark. In 1986 she joined the CDF experiment at Fermilab where she helped discover the top quark, whose properties she has been working on during the last few years. Her work in the field of particle physics continues today in the ATLAS experiment at LHC.

Anubhav Jain is currently a Luis W. Alvarez fellow in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He received his PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT under a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Anubhav's current research interests are in using high-throughput computations to solve materials problems related to energy.

Jack Lloyd worked as an engineer in the Alvarez Group from 1960 to 1970 and with Luis Alvarez in business until 1980. At LBL he participated in the development of systems to measure and analyze bubble chamber data and the development of balloon bourn detectors including super conducting magnets. Since leaving the Lab he has founded and operated several medical companies in the areas of  ophthalmology, anesthesia monitoring, drug delivery, hearing aids and home disease monitoring.

Richard Muller has over 140 scientific publications in physics, astrophysics, and geophysics. He is well known as the founder of the Berkeley project to study the expansion of the Universe, which led to a Nobel Prize (this year) for his former graduate student and post-doc Saul Perlmutter. Previously he had founded a project to measure the radiation from the Big Bang that led to a Nobel Prize (2006) for his post-doc George Smoot. Muller is the inventor of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, now the primary method used around the world for radiocarbon dating.  He has other extensive experimental and theoretical work in particle physics, astrophysics, and geophysics.  He spent over a decade studying paleoclimate, climaxing in a technical book, “Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes,” coauthored by geophysicist Gordon MacDonald. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, of the California Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Physical Society, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  He received a MacArthur Foundation Prize, the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation, and the Texas Instruments Founders Prize. Newsweek cited him as one of the top 25 Innovators in the United States, and The Atlantic Monthly listed him as one of 21 “Brave Thinkers” (along with President Obama and Steve Jobs).  He has numerous awards for teaching excellence, and was voted a “campus hero” for having helped students “beyond the call of duty.” For 34 years he was a Jason advisor to the US government on national security.  He has written eight books, including the bestseller “Physics for Future Presidents” based on his course at Berkeley voted by students as the “best class” on the Berkeley Campus. His new book, “Energy for Future Presidents” will be published this Spring. He and his daughter Elizabeth founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project in 2009.

Saul Perlmutter received his Ph.D. in 1986 from UC Berkeley, where his graduate advisor was Rich Muller. Since Rich had been Luis Alvarez' protégé, Saul inherited Luie's tradition of innovative ideas in science, coupled with rigor in the investigation of them.  A suggestion from Luie was behind the early superautomated supernova search that got Saul started on the path of finding supernovae. Saul is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which discovered, through observations of distant supernovae, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. In 2011 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his leadership in that discovery.

Morris Pripstein received his Ph.D. in experimental high-energy physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962. He then spent a year in Paris at the College de France as a de Broglie Fellow, followed by two years at the University of Illinois as a Research Assistant Professor. In 1965 he returned to Berkeley to join the Alvarez bubble chamber group at the Lawrence Radiation Lab, where he stayed for the next forty years, doing experiments at accelerators at Berkeley, Fermilab and SLAC, as well as leading efforts on detector research and development for possible experiments at the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). During this period he was also the head of group A (formerly known as the Alvarez Group) for three years and then head of the LBNL BaBar Group for eight years doing experiments on electron‐positron collisions at SLAC. Since 2002 he has been the Program Manager at the Department of Energy and then at the National Science Foundation for the U.S. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Program. During his research career he also became heavily involved on behalf of human rights of scientists worldwide, for which he was honored with the Heinz Pagels Human Rights Award from the New York Academy of Sciences (first recipient: Andrei Sakharov) and the Andre Sakharov Prize for Human Rights from the American Physical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Arthur H. Rosenfeld received his PhD in 1954 at the University of Chicago under Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi and soon accepted an offer from Luis Alvarez to join his embryonic Hydrogen Bubble Chamber (HBC) Group along with former Alvarez students Frank Crawford and Lynn Stevenson. In 1956 he joined the Berkeley Department of Physics but spent most of his time at the “Radiation Laboratory” (now LBNL) designing and managing computer programs to analyze events photographed in a growing series of hydrogen bubble chambers. The HBC were exposed to beams of sub-atomic particles created at the Bevatron. Art assembled a team of young physics staff, particularly Frank Solmitz, and distinguished visitors, to solve the challenge of identifying sub-nuclear events. This led to the discovery of many new “resonances” or particles. He continued this work until 1974 at which time he switched to the new field of efficient use of energy, formed the Center for Building Science at LBNL, and led it successfully until 1994. He then moved to Washington where he served in the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration and from 2000-2010 was Commissioner on the California Energy Commission. In 2010 he returned to LBNL as Distinguished Scientist Emeritus. Among his numerous awards (including, in 2011, Russia's Global Energy Prize, considered equivalent to a Nobel Prize in Energy) is the Enrico Fermi Award, the oldest and one of the most prestigious science and technology awards given by the U.S. Government. This award recognizes scientists of international stature for their lifetimes of exceptional achievement in the development, use, control, or production of energy. This award is particularly apt, since Dr. Rosenfeld was Enrico Fermi’s last graduate student. He is currently devoting much of his attention to an international campaign for the adoption of white roofs and “cool colored” surfaces to reduce urban heat islands and mitigate global warming.

George Smoot received Bachelor degrees (1966) in Mathematics and Physics and a Ph.D. (1970) in Physics from MIT. Smoot has been at the University of California Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1970. In April 1992, Smoot made the announcement that the team he led had detected the long sought variations in the early Universe that had been observed by NASA's COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite. COBE mapped the intensity of the radiation from the early Big Bang and found variations so small they had to be the seeds on which gravity worked to grow the galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters that are observed in the universe today. These variations are also relics of creation. Smoot was co-awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics "for discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." In 2007 he founded the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, an integrated research and education physics think-tank consolidated within the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. BCCP's focus on global partnerships has led to Smoot's appointments as the director of two separate centers of cosmology: the Institute for the Early Universe, EWHA Woman's University, Seoul, South Korea; and the Paris Center of Cosmological Physics, University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI), Paris, France. 

Charles Wohl earned his Ph.D. in the Alvarez Group in 1965.  He held post-docs in the Trilling-Goldhaber Group (LBL), at Oxford University, and at Saclay (near Paris).   He returned to Berkeley in 1977 to (re)join the Particle Data Group, and has been lecturing in the UC Berkeley physics department for 30 years.

Stanley Wojcicki received his Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics from UC Berkeley in 1962. While a graduate student in the Alvarez group he played a seminal role in the discovery of some of the resonant states that ultimately led to Alvarez's Nobel Prize. After post-docs at Berkeley, CERN, and the College de France, he joined the physics faculty at Stanford University. He has served as the chairman of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), as the Deputy Director of the SSC Central Design Group, as an executive board member of the Council of the American Physical Society, as chair of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, and as the chairman of the Physics Department at Stanford. His research activities are centered on neutrino physics at Fermilab.