The Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), an Organized Research Unit within the University of California System, is home to a permanent scientific and technical staff of 24, including 13 faculty and 2 senior research physicists. In addition, a total of 24 graduate students and 18 post-doctoral fellows are supported by the Institute. The experimental program has extensive staff support, including two integrated circuit design engineers, a PC board layout engineer, three test engineers, and a mechanical engineer/machinist.

Within the Institute, pursuits are diverse. SCIPP experimentalists are involved in a number of efforts at premier high-energy physics facilities around the world, including electron-positron colliders (the SLC and PEP-II colliders at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and the LEP collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland), the HERA electron--proton collider in Hamburg Germany, and the future LHC proton--proton collider at CERN.

SCIPP faculty and staff are involved in three particle astrophysics experiments -- the Milagro cosmic ray airshower detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, STACEE, and the space-based GLAST high-energy gamma radiation detector. In addition, SCIPP hosts a first-rate detector R&D program. This program benefits from close proximity to the vast technical resources of Silicon Valley. In particular, SCIPP is recognized as a leader in the development of custom readout electronics and module design for state-of-the-art particle detection systems. The theoretical physicists with SCIPP conduct research in a broad range of areas. The three faculty members, along with post-docs, students and visitors, maintain internationally recognized research programs in topics including the phenomenology of the standard model (particularly Higgs physics), supersymmetry phenomenology and model building, superstring theory, and cosmology, including both early universe issues (inflation, symmetry breaking, baryon asymmetry generation) and building and testing dark matter cosmological models against laboratory and astrophysical data.