Michael Ramsey-Musolf is a theoretical physicist, openly gay man, and an Episcopal priest. He is a Professor and the Director of Amherst Center for Fundamental Interactions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Personal

Ramsey-Musolf's father was an atheist political scientist and his mother was a lapsed Methodist musician.

They sent him to the Unitarian church for religious exposure. He remembers a young minister declaring that he only called on God when he needed a parking spot. It didn’t feel right to him, and he wanted to spend my Sundays with others who believed in God. Eventually, he found the Episcopal Church and fell in love with God through the sounds and visual beauty of the liturgy, and through the communion of the intellectually open-minded people he found there. ^[1] He became an ordained priest on January 29th, 1994. His work in the church is focused largely on at-risk youth.

Ramsey-Musolf was inspired to pursue science by his eleventh-grade physics class, he had previously hated science: "I had a fantastic teacher and got captivated by, particularly, modern physics, quantum physics, and relativity.

It was so compelling that it was what I had to do".

Ramsey-Musolf came out in graduate school, midst of the AIDS crisis.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013, he left three tenured and tenure-track positions due in part to unwelcoming environments.He has been part of a grassroots effort to create more awareness of sexual and gender minority issues in physics. This effort led to the first-ever APS invited session on Sexual and Gender Minority Issues in Physics. His husband, Darrel Ramsey-Musolf, is an Assistant Professor at the UMassAmherst faculty of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning.

Education

Ramsey-Musolf received his B.A. in physics and mathematics at Pomona College, a liberal arts college in Southern California. He has a liberal arts undergraduate education in philosophy and double majored in physics and mathematics. He also studied French literature and had an introduction to economics.

After Pomona College, he obtained a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1989 and, subsequently, a Master of Divinity from the Episcopal Divinity School while simultaneously holding down a post-doctorate at MIT.

He had the unique benefit of having three Ph.D. advisors – one at Princeton and two external.

Research

Ramsey-Musolf's primary goal is to figure out why there is more matter than antimatter.

His interests are in particle theory, nuclear theory, and cosmology. He is currently researching, Baryogenesis, physics beyond the Standard Model, neutrino properties and interactions, QCD and Hadron properties, and fundamental symmetries in nuclei. He has over 120 publication as of 2011.

Career

Ramsey-Musolf began his Post-doc at MIT in 1989 and finished in 1992. From 1992 to 1996, he was employed as an assistant professor at the Old Dominion University as well as a senior staff scientist at the CEBAF. Ramsey-Musolf was a fellow and research assistant professor at the Institute for Nuclear Theory from 1996 to 1998.

He began as an associate professor at the University of Connecticut in 1998, was tenured in 1999, and at left the university in 2004.

He was a senior research associate and a part of the Kellogg Theory Group PI at the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory from 2001 to 2007.

He is currently a visiting associate at this laboratory.

During Fall of 2010, he was a guest professor at the Vienna University of Technology.

Ramsey-Musolf was a professor of physics at the University Of Wisconsin-Madison from 2006-2013 and is currently a professor and the Director of Amherst Center for Fundamental Interactions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Ramsey-Musolf has also taught courses at Caltech, and summer schools. He recently served as an assistant priest at All Saints Highland Park, Los Angeles in the Diocese of Los Angeles.

Awards