David Saltzberg is an experimental particle physicist and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is known for his science consultancy work on various television shows and films, such as The Big Bang Theory, Manhattan and Oppenheimer. His research involves high-energy collider physics and the radio detection of cosmic neutrinos, and in 2018, he was inducted as a fellow of the American Physical Society. Saltzberg earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1989 from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1994. From 1995 to 1997, he worked at CERN in Switzerland. Saltzberg served as the chair of the UCLA physics and astronomy department from 2018 to 2022.
In 2023, Saltzberg, together with Peter Gorham, a professor from the University of Hawaii, was awarded the Division of Particles & Fields (DPF) Instrumentation Award from the American Physical Society. The award was given for their work on methodologies used to detect high-energy particle cascades based on the Askaryan effect, which was subsequently used in the search for petaelectronvolt (PeV) and exaelectronvolt (EeV) astrophysical neutrinos.
