Andrew Zwicker: From Plasma Physicist to NJ State Senator

Andrew Zwicker spent nearly 30 years doing plasma physics research at Princeton before he ever thought about running for office. Now he chairs the Legislative Oversight Committee in Trenton, and his path there is one of the stranger political origin stories in New Jersey’s recent memory.

Zwicker, a Democrat who represents South Brunswick in the state Senate, told the New Jersey Globe this week that the whole thing started because of Rush Holt Jr., the physicist-turned-congressman who once held the 12th congressional district seat. Holt hired Zwicker at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, where Zwicker eventually became head of public engagement and workforce development. When Holt retired from Congress after 16 years, Zwicker’s boss approached him with a pitch: get another scientist into Congress.

“I thought that was a crazy idea,” Zwicker said, “but eventually I came around and said, ‘Why not another physicist?’”

He ran in the 2014 Democratic primary for the 12th congressional district. Came in last. Bonnie Watson Coleman won that race and went on to hold the seat until her own retirement. But Zwicker’s showing caught the attention of party operatives, and the very next year, people who had worked on Watson Coleman’s campaign came looking for him.

One of them was a Ph.D. physicist at Princeton who had used her research skills to model voter behavior instead of physical systems. She told Zwicker there was a path for a Democrat to win in the 16th legislative district, a seat no Democrat had ever flipped. About 34,000 people turned out to vote that year. She was right.

Zwicker won that Assembly seat in 2015. He flipped the district’s state Senate seat in 2021, when GOP incumbent Kip Bateman chose not to run a tough re-election campaign. Last year, with Watson Coleman retiring from Congress, Zwicker considered a run for that 12th district seat he had first chased back in 2014. He decided to stay put in Trenton instead.

That decision is worth understanding in context. The 16th district covers Central Jersey communities including South Brunswick, and holding it has required real work. Zwicker didn’t inherit a safe seat. He built a majority in a district that had been Republican territory for its entire history.

In the Senate, he now chairs the Legislative Oversight Committee and sits on the Higher Education, Labor, and Budget committees. The oversight role puts him in a position to scrutinize how state agencies and departments actually execute the laws the Legislature passes, which is unglamorous work but matters as much as any headline bill. His background in science shapes how he approaches those questions: follow the data, check the methodology, demand accountability for outcomes.

He’s also vice chair of the Higher Education Committee, which ties back directly to his day job. Zwicker still works at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, which is affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy, while serving in the Legislature. The dual role is unusual even by New Jersey’s standards, where plenty of legislators hold outside employment, but most of them aren’t helping run federally funded fusion energy research.

The story he tells about getting into politics is one of reluctant recruitment, the physicist who needed convincing twice before he ran, first for Congress in 2014 and then for the Assembly in 2015. But the results since then suggest he figured out the work pretty quickly.