Professor
Professor Timothy Stelzer received his bachelor's degree in physics from St. John's University in 1988, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993. After working as a senior research assistant in the Center for Particle Theory at Durham University (UK), he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral research associate in 1995. In 1998, he was promoted to a visiting assistant research professor and to an assistant research professor in 2000.
A high-energy particle theorist, Professor Stelzer has concentrated on standard model physics at hadron colliders. He has written extensively on top-quark physics and radiation in top events. In addition, he has developed computational methods that have dramatically reduced the difficulty of performing complex cross section calculations. He is the primary author of MadGraph®, a software program that automatically generates the Feynman diagrams and helicity amplitude code for tree-level standard model processes. Most recently, he has been working on a new program to predict how often rare new particles would be produced and also what signatures would distinguish these new particles from the large background of particles already known. He has developed a novel multi-channel approach that efficiently integrates any scattering amplitude to obtain the cross section of any desired process.
Professor Stelzer is a founding member of the Physics Education Group at Illinois, where he focuses on the effective use of technology to improve student learning. His innovations include
| Semester | Course | Outstanding |
|---|---|---|
| Spring 2018 | PHYS 211 | |
| Fall 2017 | PHYS 211 | |
| Spring 2017 | PHYS 211 | |
| Spring 2016 | PHYS 212 | |
| Spring 2015 | PHYS 212 | |
| Spring 2012 | PHYS 211 | |
| Fall 2011 | PHYS 211 | |
| Spring 2011 | PHYS 211 | |
| Fall 2010 | PHYS 211 | |
| Spring 2010 | PHYS 211 | |
| Fall 2009 | PHYS 211 | |
| Spring 2009 | PHYS 212 | |
| Fall 2008 | PHYS 212 | |
| Spring 2007 | PHYS 101 | |
| Fall 2006 | PHYS 101 | |
| Spring 2006 | PHYS 101 | |
| Fall 2005 | PHYS 101 | |
| Spring 2005 | PHYS 101 | |
| Fall 2004 | PHYS 101 |
Two CERN theoretical physicists have taken a page out of Google’s playbook in an attempt to better measure the impact of scientists and their published research. In a recent study published on arXiv, Alessandro Strumia and Riccardo Torre propose new metrics that use principles of Google’s PageRank algorithm, which determines the order in which websites appear in search results.
It’s up to you and your team to save the free world from evil forces plotting its destruction, and you have precisely 60 minutes to do it. You must find out what happened to Professor Schrödenberg, a University of Illinois physicist who disappeared after developing a top-secret quantum computer that can crack any digital-security encryption code in the world. Unfortunately, the previous groups of special agents assigned to the case disappeared while investigating the very room in which you now find yourself locked up, Schrödenberg’s secret lab.
LabEscape is a new science-themed escape room now open at Lincoln Square Mall in Urbana, testing the puzzle-solving skills of groups of up to six participants at a time. Escape rooms, a new form of entertainment cropping up in cities across the U.S. and around the globe, provide in-person mystery-adventure experiences that have been compared to living out a video-game or movie script. A team of participants is presented with a storyline and locked into a room with only one hour to find and decipher a sequence of interactive puzzles that will unlock the door and complete the mission. Two escape room businesses are already in operation in the area, C-U Adventures in Time and Space in Urbana and Brainstorm Escapes in Champaign.
Timothy Stelzer has received the 2015 Rose Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The award was presented at a College of Engineering faculty awards ceremony on Monday, April 27, 2015.
Head of Department and Professor Dale Van Harlingen comments, “There is indeed not an award at any level that includes the words 'teaching excellence' for which Tim should not be a leading candidate--his impact on understanding how students learn physics and how we should teach it has been immense at Illinois and beyond. His creativity, intuition, leadership, and staggering amounts of hard work have resulted in greatly improved student outcomes and instructor satisfaction in the calculus-based introductory physics courses that are taken by every engineering student and many others across campus. I can think of no one more worthy than Tim of receiving the Scott Rose Award."
Associate Professor Timothy Stelzer's 2011 article "MadGraph 5: Going Beyond", published in the Journal of High Energy Physics [1106 (2011) 128] was cited 626 times last year making it the ninth most cited article in high-energy physics during 2014, according to INSPIRE-HEP, an open access digital library for the field of high-energy physics. The article introduces the upgraded capabilities of version 5 of MadGraph®, an online software program written by Stelzer and his collaborators.The 626 core references to this work over the course of last year are a clear reflection of just how valuable the MadGraph® digital modeling tool is to ongoing high energy physics research.