Tom Mehen Memorial Symposium - May 19, 2025

Holding onto rails, Tom Mehen smiles at the camera, his back turned to a view of mountains and a canyon

The Duke Physics department invites all to a one-day symposium celebrating Professor Tom Mehen's career, collaborations and scientific legacy. 

Tom Mehen, who joined Duke in 2002, passed away unexpectedly at his Chapel Hill home on December 29, 2024, at the age of 54.  Across his more than two decades at Duke, Mehen made substantial contributions in the field of quantum chromodynamics and the application of effective field theory to problems in hadronic physics. As a scientific and personal tribute to a very dear colleague, the Memorial Symposium will feature physics talks by his colleagues, mentees and collaborators from across the country, as well as a special session where members of the physics community can share brief personal reflections or stories about Tom.

For planning purposes, we ask attendees to please their names and relevant information to this google sheet.

Confirmed Speakers:

Matthew Baumgart - Arizona State University: Resolving the Ultracollinear paradox with EFT

Eric Braaten - The Ohio State University: Exotic hidden heavy hadrons and where to find them

Adam Falk - Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: Memorial Talk + comments about Sloan

Sean Fleming - The University of Arizona: 30 years of quarkonium physics: A lifetime of collaboration

Jaume Gomis - Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics: TBD

Zhongbo Kang - UCLA: Jet fragmentation function and J/Psi production

Ian Low - Argonne National Laboratory: Entanglement in low energy QCD

Ira Rothstein - Carnegie Mellon University: Analytic predictions at strong couplings for cold atoms.

Mark Wise - Caltech: TBD

Xiaojun Yao - University of Washington: Memorial Talk

 

Organizing Committee:

Steffen Bass

Shailesh Chandrasekharan

Sean Fleming

Berndt Mueller

 

Nearby Hotels:

JB Duke Hotel

AC Hotel Durham

Hilton Garden Inn

Millenium Hotel

University Inn

Durham Marriott