Professor Gerdes an an experimental high-energy physicist whose research addresses basic questions about the structure and properties of matter at the world's highest laboratory energies: how do the known particles interact? Are there new particles or interactions, such as supersymmetry? Why do particles have the masses that they do? What is the nature of the vacuum? He carries out his research using collisions between protons and antiprotons recorded by the CDF detector at the Fermilab Tevatron accelerator. He was a member of the team that discovered the top quark, the world's heaviest known elementary particle, and is now carrying out precision studies of its properties. He has led searches for additional quarks, as well as for large extra spatial dimensions that are predicted in some theories of low-scale quantum gravity. He is also active in physics and accelerator R&D for a future electron-positron linear collider, and has recently begun an effort on the Supernova / Acceleration Probe (SNAP) experiment, which will study the nature of the mysterious dark energy in the Universe. His other interests include undergraduate teaching, and the connection between art and physics.

Professor Gerdes is the recipient of an Outstanding Junior Investigator Award from the U.S. Department of Energy, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and an Excellence in Education Award from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

Measurement of the Top-Antitop Production Cross Section in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at sqrt (s) = 1.8 TeV, (T. Affolder et al.), Phys. Rev. D 64, 032002 (2001).

Measurement of the Top Quark Mass with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, (T. Affolder et al.), Phys. Rev. D 63, 032003 (2001).

Linear Collider Resource Book for Snowmass 2001, American Linear Collider Working Group (T. Abe et al.), FERMILAB-PUB-01-058E (2001).

Search for a Fourth Generation Quark More Massive than the Z0 Boson in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at sqrt (s) = 1.8 TeV, (T. Affolder et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 835 (2000).

Measurement of the Helicity of W Bosons in Top Quark Decays, (T. Affolder et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 216 (2000).

Observation of Hadronic W Decays in t-tbar Events with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, (F. Abe et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 5270 (1998).

Shower Maximum Trigger for Electrons and Photons at CDF, (K. Byrum et al.), Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. Sect A 364, 144 (1995).

Observation of Top Quark Production with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, (F. Abe et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 2626 (1995).

Evidence for Top Quark Production in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at sqrt (s) = 1.8 TeV, (F. Abe et al.), Phys. Rev. D 50, 2966 (1994); Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 225 (1994).

Search for W-prime?¨eƒÒ and W-prime?¨ƒÊƒÒ in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at sqrt (s) = 1.8 TeV, (F. Abe et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 2609 (1991).