Michael Lisa, a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics, has been named a 2025 Distinguished University Professor, the highest faculty honor at The Ohio State University. Senior leadership surprised Lisa with the news of his selection during a faculty meeting on April 17.
“Professor Lisa’s research in physics is truly groundbreaking, and I commend him on earning this well-deserved Ohio State title,” said Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost. “I am proud that he continues to advance our scientific knowledge while serving as a role model for future scientists and scholars.”
Michael Lisa’s research bridges the boundary between the traditional fields of nuclear physics and high-energy particle physics. His experimental studies investigate collisions between very heavy atomic nuclei traveling at nearly the speed of light. His goal is to "melt" these nuclei into a "hot stew" of quarks, which are usually trapped within protons. This phenomenon, known as "quark-gluon plasma," was last seen in nature only microseconds after the Big Bang.
Lisa’s research is responsible for seminal breakthrough discoveries. His development of azimuthally sensitive femtoscopy is a touchstone in the field, allowing for precise measurements of the size and lifetime of the fireball created in nuclear collisions. More recently, his work led to the exciting development of measuring the vorticity of the quark-gluon plasma — a way to quantify how fast this extreme fluid is swirling.
Widely recognized for his scientific contributions, Lisa received the Sambamurti Memorial Prize Lectureship from Brookhaven National Laboratory and was a Fulbright Scholar. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. In 2020 he was named a University Distinguished Scholar. He served on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Science Advisory Committee from 2016-18 and on the U.S. Nuclear Science Long Range Plan Drafting Committee from 2014-15.
He served in significant leadership positions in his field, such as Physics Analysis Coordinator and project leader for the Event Plane Detector for the STAR experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In addition, he served as the Femtoscopy working group leader at CERN (Switzerland) for four years.
Currently, he is the Scientific Coordinator for the Stellar Intensity Interferometer Science Working Group for the Cherenkov Telescope Array Consortium.
Regarded as a student favorite, Lisa is known as a caring, guiding force in developing students’ technical expertise and confidence. He was honored with this year’s Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award, and in 2020, he received the department’s Undergraduate Teaching Award. He has been a faculty member at Ohio State since 1996.
Distinguished University Professor is a permanent, honorific title awarded annually to up to six tenure-track professors who have been at Ohio State for at least five years and have demonstrated truly exceptional records in teaching, research, scholarly or creative work and in service. Distinguished University Professors automatically become members of the President's and Provost's Advisory Committee. In addition, recipients are awarded a $30,000 one-time grant to support their academic work. The honorees each received a surprise classroom visit from university leadership announcing the award.