James E. Brau (born 1946) is an American physicist at the University of Oregon (UO) who conducts research on elementary particles and fields.

Prior to joining the Oregon faculty, he served in the Air Force and held positions at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the University of Tennessee.

[2] Brau received an appointment from Rep. Thor Tollefson to the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA),[3][4] where he double-majored in physics and mathematics, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1969.

[5] Based on data collected at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory with research advisor Richard K. Yamamoto, in January 1978 he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics at MIT.

He studied the design of a uranium calorimeter for SLD and in 1985 published an analysis in collaboration with Tony A. Gabriel — the first to show that despite earlier experimental work, compensation cannot be achieved with liquid argon readout.

Using Monte Carlo calculations, Brau and Gabriel showed the importance of low energy neutron interactions with the readout medium hydrogen to achieve compensation.

[13] Brau led the Oregon group into the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration in 1997; he was a co-author of the 2016 gravitational wave discovery paper.

Brau leads the UO group of faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students at the LHC; in 2012 he was a co-author of the ATLAS Higgs boson discovery paper.

[5] In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for "distinguished contributions to the field of elementary particle physics, particularly for developing and applying new technologies to facilitate precision tests of the Standard Model".