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Obituaries

Published: December 9, 2010

A memorial service will be held today at 3:30 p.m. in 205 Natural Sciences Complex for Ulrich Baur, a professor in the Department of Physics who died Nov. 25 while on vacation with his wife, Yvonne, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was 53.

A UB faculty member since 1994, Baur’s area of specialty was theoretical high energy physics. He had performed landmark calculations of processes involving triple-boson vertices, the production of Higgs bosons and top quarks, and electroweak radiative corrections to electroweak boson production at high energy colliders. He worked closely with experimentalists and produced Monte Carlo codes for W and Z production that are widely used.

He was a member of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) collaboration, and served as co-convener of working groups and co-organizer of numerous workshops, including the annual LoopFest series, now in its ninth year, on current and future high energy physics programs at Fermilab, the LHC and the International Linear Collider (ILC).

His research had been funded continuously since 1996 by the National Science Foundation, and he co-authored more than 100 scientific papers.

Baur obtained his PhD in 1985 working with Harald Fritzsch on phenomenological aspects of composite models at the University of Munich, Germany. He joined the UB faculty after holding a postdoctoral position at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, and serving as a Max-Kade Fellow at Fermilab, a Research Fellow at CERN, a Superconducting Supercollider National Fellow, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin and a senior research scientist at the University of Florida.

He was a founder of the LHC Theory Initiative, designed to encourage graduate study in theoretical particle physics.

Baur was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008 in recognition of his contributions to precision electroweak physics, especially the phenomenology of electroweak gauge bosons at hadron colliders.

A funeral service will be held Dec. 17 in Munich and a symposium in honor of Baur’s contributions to theoretical high-energy physics is planned for spring 2011.