Lee Sawyer
editLee Sawyer (full name, Hughie Lee Sawyer, Jr.) (January 22,1963 - ) is a scientist, educator, writer, and long-time Internet user. He is currently the Academic Director for Chemistry and Physics at Louisiana Tech University.
A native of north Louisiana, Sawyer was born in Shreveport and grew up in West Monroe. He graduated with a B.S. in physics in 1985 from Northeast Louisiana University (now known as the University of Louisiana at Monroe) and completed a PhD in physics at Florida State University in 1991. His dissertation was on the forward-backward asymmetry of hadronic events in decays of the Z boson.
In the mid-nineties Sawyer was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Arlington where he worked first on detector development for the ill-fated Superconducting Supercollider project, then later on the D0 experiment at Fermilab and the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. During this period, he setup one of the first WWW sites in the U.S., and served as a moderator for the USENET discussion group sci.physics.research. He also co-authored one of the first searches for supersymmetric particles in purely leptonic final states at a hadron collider.
In 1996, Sawyer joined the faculty at Louisiana Tech University, and set about creating an experimental high energy physics group, while working on upgrades to the DZero detector. He also took part in several educational initiatives, including the Intergrated Engineering Curriculum and the Intergrated Science Curriculum developed at LA Tech. He continues to work on the D0 experiment, and is active in plans for the proposed International Linear Collider.Since 2007, he has renewed his collaboration on the ALTAS experiment at CERN. He has been closely involved in experimental tests of Quantum Chromodynamics and the measurements of the running of the strong coupling constant.
Sawyer is married, with two children and one step-daughter. He lives in Ruston, LA.