Clifford Burgess

Professor, Physics & Astronomy

I was born in Manitoba and was raised in various places around Western Canada, Ontario and Europe.

I received my B.Sc. in a co-op programme, with a joint honours in Physics and Applied Math from the University of Waterloo. I did my doctoral work in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Texas in Austin under the supervision of Steven Weinberg.

After doing a short postdoctoral stint at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in 1987 I joined the faculty at McGill University, where I was made James McGill Professor in 2003. I am presently a professor with McMaster University’s department of Physics and Astronomy and am an Associate Faculty Member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I have spent sabbatical years with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as the University of Neuchatel and CERN in Switzerland.

I was a Killam Fellow from 2005 – 2007 and elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008. I received the Canadian Association of Physicists/Centre de Recherches Mathematiques (CAP-CRM) prize for theoretical physics in 2010, and a Buchalter Cosmology Prize in 2016 and again in 2017.

I have written two textbooks (The Standard Model: A Primer and Introduction to Effective Field Theory, both published by Cambridge University Press), the second of which was named Best Book in Physics and Chemistry by the American Publishers Association in 2021.