Physicist ranked eighth top female scientist in the world

Author: Iqbal Pittalwala
December 12, 2022

Research.com, a research portal for scientists that publishes rankings of leading experts in a variety of fields, has ranked Gail Hanson, a distinguished professor emerita of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, as the eighth top female scientist in 2022.

This is the first edition of the ranking of female scientists, which measures the impact of a researcher’s publications. The portal plans to publish the ranking each year to recognize the work of female scholars worldwide. 

Gail Hanson.

According to the rankings, this year’s top 10 female scientists are:

  1. JoAnn E. Manson (Harvard Medical School)
  2. Virginia M.-Y. Lee (University of Pennsylvania)
  3. Aviv Regev (Broad Institute)
  4. Tamara B. Harris (National Institutes of Health)
  5. Unnur Thorsteinsdottir (deCODE Genetics Iceland)
  6. Brenda W.J.H. Penninx (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
  7. Terrie E. Moffitt (Duke University)
  8. Gail Hanson (University of California, Riverside)
  9. Julie E. Buring (Brigham and Women’s Hospital)
  10. Nora D. Volkow (National Institute on Drug Abuse)

“We congratulate Professor Hanson on this recognition of her work and her distinguished career,” said Owen Long, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “It comes as no surprise that she’s ranked so highly on this list.”

Hanson joined UCR in 2002. She has conducted experiments at the Large Hadron Collider — the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — in Geneva, Switzerland. Specifically, her research has involved the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, a general-purpose detector. The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history.

Hanson is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize from the American Physical Society. She is the author or coauthor of numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals on several topics in particle physics, such as the Higgs boson, the Standard Model, neutrinos and muons, and the CMS experiment. She received her doctoral degree in experimental high energy physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.