This article includes excerpts from the Yale GSAS article, “Graduate School honors four exceptional alumni with 2025 Wilbur Cross Medal,” published on October 24, 2025.
Yale Physics alumnus Andrew J. Lankford awarded Wilbur Cross Medal
Lankford is seated in the bottom row, third from left.
On October 20, experimental particle physicist Andrew J. Lankford ’72, ’78 PhD (Physics), along with three other Yale Graduate School alumni, was awarded the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal during a ceremony at Yale. The other honorees are Philip J. Deloria ’94 PhD (American Studies), Samuel Jay Keyser ’62 PhD (Linguistics), and Jeffrey Settleman ’89 PhD (Genetics).
The Wilbur Cross Medals, the highest honor the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) bestows on its alumni, are given annually by the GSAS Alumni Association for exceptional teaching, scholarship, public service, or academic administration. The awards celebrate the legacy of service and achievements of Wilbur Lucius Cross 1889 PhD, who served as dean of the Graduate School from 1916 to 1930 and was Connecticut’s governor from 1930 to 1939.
Lankford and Professor Reina Maruyama in front of the HAYSTAC experiment at Wright Lab.
The Yale Physics Department and Wright Lab hosted a series of events with Lankford on that day. Events included a tour of Science Hill and Yale Physics buildings for Lankford, a lunch panel discussion with Lankford and Yale Physics faculty held at Wright Lab on “The Future of Particle Physics,” a meet and greet with undergraduate physics students hosted by the Society of Physics students, and a scientific lecture. The day concluded with a dinner and official medal presentation on the 14th floor of Kline Tower.
Lankford is a particle physicist who has searched for new fundamental particles and new phenomena at colliding beam accelerators around the world. He was deputy spokesperson of the international ATLAS Collaboration during the inaugural years of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, a long-sought-after fundamental particle. He shared the 2013 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society for the discovery. He also shared the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the successful research program conducted at CERN since the Higgs discovery.
Lankford is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine. He has served on and led numerous national and international advisory panels in the fields of particle physics, nuclear physics, and cosmology. As chair of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, he oversaw the development of a U.S. strategic plan for particle physics.
Lankford’s Ph.D. advisor at Yale was Jack Sandweiss.
“The Future of Particle Physics” panel discussion at Wright Lab.