Physics Professor Appointed to Prestigious National Museum Board
Jennifer Klay’s academic concentrations span nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, particle physics, computational physics, and physics education.
Physics Department Chair Jennifer Klay has been appointed to the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
A museum news release described Klay as a world-renowned nuclear physicist and educator who brings “over two decades of expertise in fundamental research, academic leadership, and public advocacy.”
Klay’s accolades include the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her work with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, located in Switzerland. The LHC accelerates charged particles to near the speed of light and collides them to study fundamental physics, including the properties of elementary particles, conditions resembling those just after the Big Bang, and potential candidates for dark matter.
Klay has contributed to seven major experimental collaborations at six U.S. National Laboratories, and international research at CERN and the Max Planck Institute in Munich.
Among her other work, Klay has collaborated with David Rakestraw, a senior scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area, to launch Physics with Phones curriculum at Cal Poly.
The free curriculum merges technology, biology and physics in a Physics 125 course, an introductory lab required for pre-healthcare and pre-veterinarian students. The use of the innovative smartphone curriculum involves physics experiments and artificial intelligence.
Klay’s academic concentrations span nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, particle physics, computational physics, and physics education. She has worked with students on several projects, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, to explore nuclear collisions at low and high energy.