and in 1966 his Ph.D., with advisor Louis J. Koester Jr., from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with thesis A search for heavy leptons using a differential Cherenkov counter.
Beier has worked, since the end of the 1970s, on neutrino physics, first at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Experiment 734) and then, starting in 1984, on the science team of Kamiokande II.
In 1984 Professor Beier joined with other scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and from a group of Japanese institutions in the Kamiokande II experiment.
[4] His current research deals with the question of whether neutrinos are their own anti-particles; the investigation involves searching for the rare (and perhaps entirely hypothetical) neutrino-less double beta decay occurring within atomic nuclei.
The Kamiokande II work and especially the observation from Supernova 1987a led to the award of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics to Masatoshi Koshiba.