Abhay Deshpande
Associate Laboratory Director, Nuclear and Particle Physics
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Nuclear and Particle Physics
Bldg. 510F, Room 1-34
P.O. Box 5000
Upton, NY 11973-5000
(631) 344-8783
abhay@bnl.gov
Abhay Deshpande is Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Nuclear and Particle Physics (NPP) and the EIC Sciecne Director at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is also a State University of New York (SUNY) Distinguished Professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. He is Founding Director of the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science (CFNS), setup jointly by BNL and Stony Brook University. Abhay studies the quark-gluon structure and dynamics inside the protons and nuclei to understand Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions within the Standard Model of physics. He also uses precision electroweak probes to explore the limits of the Standard Model (SM) of physics and search for effects beyond it.
Expertise | Research | Education | Appointments | Awards
Expertise
Abhay Deshpande works in experimental nuclear and high energy physics. His current research includes various exploratory and precision studies in QCD using polarized proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus beams of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island; and high intensity polarized electron beams of the recently upgraded Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory, in Newport News, Virginia. He has in the past worked at CERN and DESY before he started working at RHIC.
Research Activities
Abhay has been involved and led nuclear/particle physics experiments at BNL (Upton, NY, USA), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), DESY (Hamburg, Germany), Jefferson Laboratory (Newport News, Virginia, USA)) and PSI (Zurich, Switzerland). He is one of the earliest proponents of the Electron Ion Collider (EIC) since the late 1990’s and has been a leader in developing the EIC science, making the case for it, initiating, and organizing the Users Community and detector collaborations around this project.
Education
Abhay received his Master’s in physics from Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur, India) in 1987, Ph.D. from Yale University in experimental high-energy particle physics in 1994.
Professional Appointments
After spending four years at CERN and DESY as a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist both positions at Yale University, he became a Fellow of the RIKEN BNL Research Center at BNL in 2000. He moved to Stony Brook University as tenure track Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University in 2004, promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2008, Professor in 2013 and finally appointed State University of New York’s highest professorship “Distinguished Professor” in 2021. Since 2017 he has served as EIC Science Director and the Director of the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science. In 2024 he steppde in as Interim ALD at BNL and in May 2025 was invited to serve as a full time Associate Lab Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics.
Awards & Recognition
- Inducted in to NY State's Distinguished Academy (2021)
- Fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science (2021)
- Distinguished Alumnus Award, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India (2021)
- Distinguished Visiting Professor, IIT (Hydrabad, Kanpur) 2024-2026
- Distinguished Visint Affiliate, U of Hiroshima, Japan (2024-2027)
- SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research and Innovation (2018)
- RIKEN President's Special Prize for the Study of Nucleon Spin (2015)
- Fellow of American Physical Society (2014)
- National Academy of Science's Education Fellow for Life Sciences (2013)
- RIKEN-BNL Fellowship (2000-2007)
- Gibbs Medal, U of Bombay, India, 1985.
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Nuclear and Particle Physics
Bldg. 510F, Room 1-34
P.O. Box 5000
Upton, NY 11973-5000
(631) 344-8783
abhay@bnl.gov
