Steve Ritz is a Professor of Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz and is the Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP).

Ritz has done accelerator-based experiments at most of the world’s leading laboratories, including DESY, CERN, Fermilab, and SLAC. As a graduate student, he worked on e+e- experiments, developing techniques to search for charged Higgs bosons and other hypothesized particles that decay to hadronic jets.  During this period, he also co-authored several early theoretical papers on particle signatures of dark matter.  As a post-doc and faculty member at Columbia, he worked on the ZEUS experiment at the HERA electron-proton collider.  In addition to leading roles in the development of the digital electronics and front-end processing for the calorimeter readout and other hardware contributions, he worked on many physics topics, including the analysis of the first charged-current events at very high Q² in the search for leptoquarks. Since 1996, he has been very active in the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (née GLAST), which has made significant discoveries in a wide variety of topics ranging from cosmic particle accelerators such as pulsars and supermassive black hole systems to searches for signals of dark matter and tests of fundamental physics. He was the Project Scientist for the Fermi mission from 2003 through most of the first year of science operations, and in 2009 he moved from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to UCSC. He continued to play various leadership roles in Fermi, including LAT Collaboration Deputy Principal Investigator, until he took on the role of LSST Camera Project Scientist in 2013.

His current interests include dark energy studies using weak lensing and searches for signatures of dark matter. Essentially all of his available research time is now devoted to working with colleagues on the LSST Camera, which is currently being integrated at SLAC.

In his spare time, he has also been involved in several aspects of science policy, including most recently serving as chair of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), which produced the strategic plan for US particle physics. He also serves on numerous international scientific advisory committees and was a member of several National Academies of Sciences committees, including the Board on Physics and Astronomy (2016-19), the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics (Co-chair 2016-19), the 2010 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the 2016 Mid-decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Ritz is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal.  He was a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Physics, and he also received the 1981 Bertman Prize in Physics at Wesleyan University, where he double majored in physics and in music.  In 2012, he received a UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award.

Issues related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion continue to be a very high priority, which is why, most recently, Ritz asked to be on the Physics Department Diversity and Climate committee (2018-present, Chair in 2019-20) and the Graduate Recruitment committee (2018-present).