Rate My Professor Jianming Bian

Jianming Bian is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, within the School of Physical Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2009, and his B.S. in Physics from Peking University. Prior to his appointment at UCI, Bian conducted research on searches for exotic-hadron states and studies of charm and charmonium physics in collider experiments. He served as lead researcher for analyses with the BESIII experiment in Beijing and was the primary author of the discovery of the new four-quark candidate Zc(3900)^0.

Bian's research focuses on Intensity Frontier programs, particularly major neutrino experiments such as NOvA, DUNE, FLArE, and Super-Kamiokande. His group performs neutrino oscillation analyses aimed at determining the neutrino mass ordering and CP violation phase, neutrino-electron elastic scattering measurements to constrain neutrino fluxes, and develops AI/ML technologies including deep learning for kinematic reconstruction of particle energy, direction, and vertex, Bayesian learning for oscillation parameter inference, and transformers for neutrino flavor tagging and final-state particle identification. He holds key leadership positions, including founding co-chair of the DUNE AI/ML Forum Committee, convener of NOvA’s Reconstruction and Deep Learning group, and Team Leader for the purity monitoring system at DUNE, which ensures liquid-argon quality for the experiment's physics program. Bian's interdisciplinary group at UCI comprises physics graduate students and postdocs, as well as students from computer science and statistics departments collaborating on deep-learning algorithms and statistical tools. Notable recent publications include “Search for Accelerator-Produced Sub-GeV Dark Matter with the NOvA Near Detector” (arXiv:2507.10754, submitted to PRL, 2025), “Spatial and Temporal Evaluations of the Liquid Argon Purity in ProtoDUNE-SP” (arXiv:2507.08586, accepted by JINST, 2025), “Particle hit clustering and identification using point set transformers in liquid argon time projection chambers” (JINST 20 P07030, 2025), and contributions to DUNE white papers on software, computing, detectors, and the science program (arXiv:2503 series, 2025).