Professor Beck received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Saskatchewan in 1979, and his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. After working as a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology for two years, he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in 1989. He was promoted to associate professor in 1994 and to full professor in 1999.
Professor Beck is the creator, spokesman, principal driving force, and intellectual leader of the G0 experiment at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. This collaboration of more than 80 senior physicists from 18 institutions is designed to elucidate a detailed spatial distribution of charge and current densities for strange quarks. The Illinois group, under Professor Beck's leadership, is responsible for the main instrumentation for the experiment, a superconducting toroidal spectrometer. The $2M magnet for the spectrometer was designed and tested at Illinois before being successfully installed at JLab. The eight internal lead collimators for the magnet were also assembled and tested at Illinois.
Together with collaborators at a number of institutions including Berkeley, Caltech, Duke, Los Alamos and MIT Doug Beck and his research group are developing an exciting new experiment to search for an electric dipole moment of the neutron. This is an intrinsically time-reversal violating quantity that is related to the observed preponderance of matter over antimatter in today's universe. In this connection, we are developing tools and techniques for handling polarized 3He at cryogenic temperatures as an integral part of the experiment.