During his time at Syracuse, he has spent half-year sabbaticals at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and at Innovalight, Inc., a startup company. From 2014-1017, he served concurrently as a program director at ARPA-E, an agency of the Department of Energy. There he initiated the SHIELD research program of a dozen research projects for development of inexpensive efficiency retrofits for legacy single pane windows. He also supervised a portfolio of additional projects on solar energy conversion and other energy technologies.

Schiff’s own research accomplishments include development of low-mobility solar cell device physics for thin film solar cells such as perovskites, amorphous silicon, and cadmium telluride. His fundamental physics contributions include work on electronic transport and defects in semiconductors as well as on plasmonics. He is co-author of more than 100 refereed research publications with more than 4,000 citations and he is co-inventor on three U.S. patents. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Research Interests

Gravitational wave detection strategies.
Heuristics of gravitational wave detectors.
Thermal noise in mechanical experiments.
Internal friction in materials.

Education
1981 Ph.D. in Physics
Princeton University
1978 A.M. in Physics
Princeton University
1976 A.B. magna cum laude in Physics
Harvard University

Awards & Professional Honors
Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics
Fellow of the American Physical Society (elected 2003)
Scholar-Teacher of the Year for 2003
Physics Department Undergraduate Teaching Award 2002

Selected Publications
A. Ageev, Belkis Cabrera Palmer, Antonio De Felice, Steven D. Penn, and Peter R. Saulson, “Very high quality factor measured in annealed fused silica”, Classical and Quantum Gravity 21, 3887 (2004).

Peter R. Saulson, “If light waves are stretched by gravitational waves, how can we use light as a ruler to detect gravitational waves?”, American Journal of Physics, 65, 501 (1997).

Gabriela Gonzalez and Peter R. Saulson, “Brownian motion of a torsional pendulum with internal friction”, Physics Letters A 201, 12 (1995).

Peter R. Saulson, Fundamentals of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors (Singapore: World Scientific) 300 pp. (1994).

Peter R. Saulson, “Thermal noise in mechanical experiments”, Physical Review D 42, 2437 (1990).

Education
2006 Ph.D. in Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2000 Diploma in Physics, with honors in Theoretical Physics
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) – Zurich

Awards & Professional Honors
Robert A. Millikan Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship for Experimental Astrophysics (2006), California Institute of Technology
Honorable Mention, GWIC (Gravitational Wave International Committee) Thesis Prize (2006)

Selected Publications
J. Abadie et.al. , “Directional limits on persistent gravitational waves using LIGO S5 science data”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 271102 (2012).

S. Ballmer, S. Marka, P. Shawhan, “Feasibility of measuring the Shapiro time delay over meter-scale distances”, Class. Quantum Grav. 27 185018.

B. Abbott, et. al., “An upper limit on the stochastic gravitational-wave background of cosmological origin” Nature 460 (2009) 990.

E. Thrane, S. Ballmer, J. D. Romano, S. Mitra, D. Talukder, S. Bose, V. Mandic, “Probing the anisotropies of a stochastic gravitational-wave background using a network of ground-based laser interferometers” Phys. Rev. D80, 122002 (2009).

M. Evans, S. Ballmer, M. Fejer, P. Fritschel, G. Harry, G. Ogin “Thermo-optic noise in coated mirrors for high-precision optical measurements” Phys. Rev. D78, 102003 (2008).

Awards & Professional Honors
Research Corporation Scialog Fellow, 2015
Fellow of the American Physical Society, 2014
Cottrell Scholar, 2010
Syracuse University Meredith Teaching Recognition Award, 2010
Kavli Frontiers Fellow, 2009
National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2008

Selected Publications
Abbott B P et al., Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger, Phys Rev Lett 116 061102 (2016).
Hannam Mark, Brown Duncan A, Fairhurst Stephen, Fryer Chris L, and Harry Ian W, When can gravitational-wave observations distinguish between black holes and neutron stars?, Astrophys J Letters 766 L14 (2013).

Singer Leo P, Cenko S Bradley, Kasliwal Mansi M, Perley Daniel A, Ofek Eran O, Brown Duncan A, et al., Discovery and redshift of an optical afterglow in 71 square degrees iPTF13bxl and GRB 130702A, Astrophys J Letters 776 L34 (2013).

Babak S., Biswas R., Brady P. R., Brown D. A., Cannon K., et al., Searching for gravitational waves from binary coalescence, PhysRev D87 024033 (2013).

Brown Duncan A, Harry Ian, Lundgren Andrew, and Nitz Alexander H, Detecting binary neutron star systems with spin in advanced gravitational-wave detectors, Phys Rev D86 084017 (2012).

Abadie J et al., Search for Gravitational Waves from Low Mass Compact Binary Coalescence in LIGO’s Sixth Science Run and Virgo’s Science Runs 2 and 3, PhysRev D85 082002 (2012).