Rate My Professor Rene Bellwied

Rene Bellwied is the M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Houston. He earned his Ph.D. from Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Prior to joining the University of Houston, he served as a Physics Professor at Wayne State University from 1991 to 2010. At UH, he held the position of Associate Chair of the Department of Physics from 2013 to 2019, U.S. Coordinator for the LHC ALICE Experiment from 2015 to 2018, and Chair of the Texas Section of the American Physical Society since 2018. He is also a member of the Physics Policy Committee of the APS from 2010 to 2012, Chair of the National User Facility Organization from 2008 to 2012, and serves on the Editorial Board of Universe Magazine since 2019. Bellwied leads the UH Relativistic Heavy Ion Group, which includes professors, postdoctoral fellows, and Ph.D. students working on experiments at RHIC and LHC.

Dr. Bellwied is an experimental nuclear physicist specializing in relativistic heavy ion physics. His research focuses on measuring and understanding the formation of visible matter during the early evolution of the Universe, particularly the phase transition from Quark-Gluon Plasma to hadrons such as pions, protons, and neutrons. His group studies heavy ion collisions at near light speed to recreate conditions microseconds after the Big Bang, analyzing strange exotic particles, heavy flavor production, collective flow phenomena, quantum entanglement from initial to final states, and connections to neutron star mergers. He is a founding member of the STAR experiment at RHIC, where the Quark-Gluon Plasma was discovered in 2005, and a member of the ALICE experiment at LHC and ePIC. In 2025, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for contributions to the ALICE collaboration studying quark-gluon plasma and exotic matter states. Key publications include 'Beam energy dependence of net-Lambda fluctuations measured by the STAR experiment at RHIC' (2020), 'Off-diagonal correlators of conserved charges from lattice QCD' (2020), 'Freeze-out temperature from net-kaon fluctuations at RHIC' (2019), 'Quantum entanglement in relativistic heavy ion collisions' (2018), 'Multiplicity-dependent enhancement of strange hadron production in proton-proton collisions' (2017), 'The QCD Phase Diagram from analytical continuation' (2015), and 'Is there a flavor hierarchy in the deconfinement transition of QCD?' (2013).