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Stars Align for New Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

David Gerdes is a renowned physicist and astronomer known for discoveries and leadership

Photo by Rob WetzlerDavid Gerdes

David Gerdes, PhD, became dean of Case Western Reserve University's College of Arts and Sciences in March, bringing interdisciplinary accomplishments as a researcher, educator and leader to a campus that thrives on collaborations across academic fields.

Gerdes began his career as a high-energy physicist, exploring what the world is made of and how it works at the smallest and largest scales. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he began a 15-year association with the Collider Detector at Fermilab experimental collaboration, which studied proton-anti-proton collisions. Gerdes was part of the team that discovered "top quark," the heaviest known elementary building block of matter, which led to him being named a fellow of the American Physical Society.

In some ways, it also put him on another career path—as an astrophysicist.

Gerdes said researchers had discovered top quark by finding a few dozen particular particle collisions out of trillions of collisions. "It took all the ingenuity we could manage to pull those very special events out," he said. "It's not an unnatural transition to start applying those same kinds of skills and ways of thinking about problems to the analysis of astronomical survey data."

After making the shift, Gerdes led work that garnered widespread attention. In 2016, his research team discovered DeeDee, a possible dwarf planet the size of Ohio and three times Neptune's distance from the sun. As a result, NASA reached out and Gerdes' team helped the agency find additional distant minor planets for its New Horizons spacecraft to explore.

Gerdes spent most of his career as a physics professor at the University of Michigan, earning the school's highest teaching awards and serving as physics department chair for the last six years. He earned a bachelor's degree at Carleton College, a master's at Cambridge University and a PhD in experimental high-energy physics at The University of Chicago.

Now the Hudson, Ohio, native leads the College of Arts and Sciences—and with a clear purpose.

The core mission of a college is "to explore fearlessly, to deepen our understanding of the human and natural world, to pursue the common good, to practice inclusive excellence in our research and teaching and to train the next generation of thoughtful, engaged citizens," Gerdes said. "I'll be a passionate advocate for this mission across the full breadth of the college and beyond."

— DAVE HINTZ