David Nygren, a renowned physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, has been appointed Presidential Distinguished Professor in the UT Arlington College of Science and will join the University this fall.

Nygren is known for inventing the Time Projection Chamber, or TPC, used worldwide for over three decades in a variety of applications in particle detection and discovery, ranging from relativistic heavy ion collisions to the search for Dark Matter, and extremely rare nuclear decays.

Nygren has worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1973 and was promoted to Distinguished Scientist in 1995 because of his invention of the TPC and innovations in charge-coupled devices used in digital imaging as well as medical imaging and pixel arrays. He is the only Distinguished Scientist currently working at the Berkeley Laboratory. He also is a fellow of the American Physical Society; a recipient of the Panofsky Prize of the American Physical Society, the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Department of Energy and the Berkeley Lab Prize - Lifetime Achievement Award.

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