Dr. Declan Keane, a physics faculty member at Kent State since 1988, is a prominent figure in experimental nuclear science. Keane’s research group made worldwide headlines in 2010 after their discovery of the heaviest antimatter nucleus was published in the journal Science. This antinucleus was the first to contain a type of quark not found in ordinary nuclei or antinuclei, and the discovery opens a completely new region of the three‐dimensional generalization of the Periodic Table of elements. The published measurements have direct implications for ongoing searches for new phenomena in the cosmos.

The postdoctoral and graduate students in Keane’s group are stationed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York where the experiments are conducted as part of a large international collaboration at an accelerator measuring 2.4 miles in circumference, while Keane himself mostly works remotely from Kent. Previously, his research focus was on an earlier generation experiment at Brookhaven, and he served as spokesperson for the 55 physicists from 12 institutions that carried out this research.