Glennys Farrar, Ph.D.

Glennys R. Farrar is a Collegiate Professor of Physics and Julius Silver, Rosalind S. Silver and Enid Silver Winslow Professor at New York University. Farrar’s primary research goal is discovering the identity of the dark matter that comprises more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe yet does not contain protons and neutrons, making it fundamentally different than any known type of matter. She is currently investigating whether it can be composed of quarks in a hard-to-discern form that has eluded discovery or must be evidence of an entirely new sub-nuclear world as usually assumed.

She received her B.A. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and Ph. D. in physics from Princeton University in 1971, the first woman to do so. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1971-1973, then research scientist at Caltech from 1973–1974. She was promoted to assistant professor at Caltech in 1974, but was converted to senior research scientist in 1977, being told that was necessary in order to avoid coming up for tenure review. She joined the faculty of Rutgers University in 1979, then moved to NYU in 1998 to be chair of the Physics Department. In 2001 she founded the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and served as its director for seven years. Farrar is a recent chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society and was a member of the Snowmass 2021 Steering Committee and a long-time editor of the Journal of Cosmology and Particle Physics. She is a Fellow of APS and AAAS, has received Sloan, Guggenheim, and Simons Fellowships, and serves on advisory panels for NASA, NSF, and the European Research Council. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.