Larry Gladney
Larry Donnie Gladney is an American experimental particle physicist and cosmologist. He serves as a professor of physics at Yale University and the divisional dean for science in the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At Yale, he also served as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean of diversity and faculty development from 2019 to 2025. He was previously a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gladney is an experimentalist researcher focusing on the origins of matter, energy, space, and time. He has been profiled by The HistoryMakers and the National Society of Black Physicists, and is included on Scott W. Williams' website, Physicists of the African Diaspora.
Biography
Larry Gladney was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Mississippi. His mother, Annie Lee Gladney, raised him in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he attended primary and secondary school, graduating in 1975 from East St. Louis High School. He earned a B.A. degree in physics from Northwestern University in 1979, an M.S. from Stanford University, and, further, a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford in 1985. From 1985 to 1988, he was a post-doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he then joined the faculty. He reached the rank of full professor in 2005, and later became chair of the physics department. During his time at the Penn, he served as a chair of the African-American Resource Center's faculty advisory board. At Penn Gladney also held a named professorship: Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence. He and was also the associate dean for natural sciences while holding a secondary appointment as a professor of education in the Graduate School of Education. During his time at Penn, he was also active in science education outreach in Philadelphia-area schools.In January 2019, he assumed positions as a professor of physics and Phyllis A. Wallace Dean of Diversity and Faculty Development at within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. Yale created this dean of diversity position in 2015 after students demonstrated to protest what they described as the inhospitable climate for black students at the university. He became dean of the FAS division of science in 2022. In June 2025, his term as diversity dean ended.
Research and leadership in physics
Larry Gladney specializes in astro-particle physics and cosmology and in experimental particle physics. He has conducted extensive research on the weak interactions of heavy quarks and the nature of dark energy. One of his earliest breakthroughs occurred in the Collider Detector at Fermilab, where in the mid-1980s he studied the weak interactions of bottom hadrons. More recently, he has been involved in research with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, under construction in Chile, which aims to measure the expansion history of the universe.Gladney has served on the National Science Foundation–Department of Energy High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, the Director's Review Board of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Experimental Physics Advisory Committee for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and the Program Advisory Committee for LIGO.