Strom was born in Montana in 1957, the son of Kathryn Jean (née Mattill)[1] and Herbert Edward Strom.[2] He was awarded a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics in 1980 at St. Olaf College.[3] He earned a Ph.D. in Physics in 1986 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with his dissertation, Measurement of the D0 lifetime,[4] advised by Sau Lan Wu.[3]
Strom is married to Katja Heide,[2] and they have two sons.
Career
After earning his Ph.D., Strom was a research associate at Madison for a year. He was a McCormick Fellow at the University of Chicago for two years,[5] and he became a research associate there from 1989–1991.[3]
Strom joined the physics faculty at the University of Oregon in 1991.[6] He researches topics in experimental high energy physics, including "Quantum black hole production in proton-proton collisions, Higgs (in beyond the Standard Model Scenarios), triggering at hadron colliders, detectors and electronics for linear colliders, precision electroweak measurements, ATLAS".[7]
From 2001–2002, Strom served as a member of the University Senate at the University of Oregon.[8]
In Spring 2011, Strom was elected by the ATLAS Collaboration Board as deputy trigger coordinator for the ATLAS experiment at CERN'sLarge Hadron Collider. After serving as deputy trigger coordinator, Strom assumed the role of trigger coordinator in late 2011.[9] The University of Oregon's Physics News said, "The ATLAS detector is massive, stretching about 150 feet long and more than 80 feet high. It is about half as big as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and weighs close to 7,000 tons, the same as the Eiffel Tower or a hundred 747 jets."[10]
Eric Tucker reported,
The trigger is a vital component of the ATLAS experiment, an international collaboration involving 2,000 scientists, including a team of UO physicists. Their work seeks to shed light on such scientific enigmas as the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space, black holes and dark matter by smashing together beams of high-energy protons and analyzing the debris. The trigger selects events with potentially interesting interactions from the very large collision event rate (as many as 600 million per second at full power) to arrive at a manageable fraction of the massive amount of data to be recorded... Whether a breakthrough takes place in two years or by the end of the decade, the answers to the ultimate questions have never been so close at hand.
ATLAS Collaboration (March 19, 2016). "Search for New Phenomena in Dijet Mass and Angular Distributions from pp Collisions at s√ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS Detector". Physics Letters B. 754: 302–322. arXiv:1512.01530. doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2016.01.032. S2CID124307471.
^ abTucker, Eric (Spring 2011). "Trigger Man". CASCADE, UO College of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on March 10, 2012. Retrieved May 25, 2022.