Caltech Mourns the Passing of Mark B. Wise (1953–2026)

Caltech is mourning the death of Mark B. Wise, its John A. McCone Professor of High Energy Physics, who died on July tenth at the age of seventy-two. Wise was a particle physicist whose work centered on the fundamental building blocks of matter, and he played a key role in developing what's known as heavy quark effective theory, a framework that let physicists make precise predictions about the strong nuclear force that binds quarks into protons and neutrons. According to Caltech News, he joined the faculty in nineteen eighty-two, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and received the American Physical Society's J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in two thousand one. A colleague remembered him as a distinguished scientist and a dedicated, generous teacher and mentor.

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