Rick Gaitskell is Hazard Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for the Fundamental Physics of the Universe (CFPU)+ at Brown University. He is a long-standing member of the world-leading dark matter search experiment LZ collaboration.  He has been pursuing the direct detection of dark matter detection for over 25 years. He was the spokesperson of the LUX experiment at Sanford Lab, a PI on the XENON10 experiment at LNGS, Italy, CDMS II at Soudan Mine, MN, and also worked on the CDMS I experiment at Stanford University.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Chen graduated from the University of Cambridge with a B.A.(Hons) in 2013. He earned his M.S. from New York University in 2018. He had been working on the anisotropy of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) before joining Brown PA group in 2021. He is now active in LZ dark matter project, focusing on analysis at the moment.

Jeanne earned her B.S. in physics from Seoul National University in 2018 and joined the Brown PA group in the same year. In her undergraduate years, she worked on particle physics fields including neutrinos and high energy experiments. Her current research interests are dark matter, particle physics and astrophysics. She is now actively involved in LZ dark matter project.

Casey earned his B.S. in Astronomy and Physics from Yale University in 2013 and focused his research efforts on simulations of the PIXeY research detector, its light response and its neutron recoil discrimination as a function of its drift field. After graduating, he spent a year researching potential radon screening techniques for LZ at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

Casey has worked on simulations and experiments of a new neutron calibration mode using a Deuterium-Deuterium neutron generator that would expand LZ’s nuclear recoil calibration capabilities into a new lower energy regime. This calibration work is used in LZ. Casey led the environmental cleanliness controls and monitoring and jointly directed the assembly of the LZ photomultiplier tube arrays, which helped to deliver the arrays with a sufficiently low level of ambient radioactive contamination for use in LZ.

Will joined the Brown PA group in the summer of 2014 after graduating from Princeton University with a B.A. in physics. Will’s undergraduate work focused on polonium contamination in low-background experiments such as Borexino and DarkSide.

Since joining the group, he has been involved with managing the data processing and served as Data Processing Coordinator for the LUX Collaboration in 2015. He also works on the group’s neutron calibration efforts and became L3 for the LZ neutron calibration work in January 2017. In addition, he has designed LZ’s LED calibration system.

Xin started as a Leon N Cooper Postdoctoral fellow at Brown University in October 2018. Upon the arrival, Xin joined the local particle astrophysics group under Richard Gaitskell and has been actively involved in both software and hardware aspects of LZ dark matter project. Xin is also interested in exploring innovative ideas to explore low mass DM.

Prior to joining Brown, Xin received his B.S. degree (advisor: Benjamin Monreal) from UCSB with Highest Honors in 2013 and his Ph.D. degree (advisor: Cristiano Galbiati) in physics from Princeton University in 2018. Xin’s Ph.D. dissertation details the studies of Cherenkov-related background in the DarkSide-50 detector.

Xin’s Erdős number is 6, and his Bacon number is infinity.

Samuel received his Bachelor of Science in Astrophysics from University of Toronto in 2012. Since joining the group in summer 2012, Samuel has worked on the characterization, assembly, and overall management of the R11410 PMT arrays in LZ. He is also highly involved in the LZ xenon skin PMT system. Apart from the PMT work he is also interested in applying machine learning to go beyond current analysis boundaries. For example, analyzing raw PMT waveforms using machine learning can help the search for rare decay events hidden in LUX data.

Hopefully more of these rare decays will happen in LZ and be detected by the PMT arrays he built!

Dongqing joined Brown PA group in the summer of 2012. He has been heavily involved in LUX dark matter search experiment since its commissioning, pioneering the field of low energy calibration of LXe response to incident particles. His work will significantly improve LXe TPC sensitivities to low mass WIMPs. Dongqing has also worked on the LZ experiment, serving as the L3 manager for LZ DD neutron calibration system from summer 2015 to early 2017.

He joined University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as a research fellow to continue dark matter searches with the LZ experiment.

Jake received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2013. He originally transferred from Community College of Rhode Island in 2010 and was awarded the Rensselaer Award for Excellence for having an outstanding transfer resume.

After finishing his undergraduate thesis on modeling the spatio-kinematic structure of SNR E0102 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, Jake bounced around the United States working both as a private tutor and employed instructor for various agencies. In early 2016 he joined Rick Gaitskell’s group as a LZ Research Technician to provide research engineering expertise for the LZ PMT Testing Program. In that pursuit he helped design, build, and operate a cryogenic chamber used to test over 500 PMTs that will be used in the LZ Dark Matter Experiment.

Devon graduated from Brown University in 2017 with a B.S. in Astrophysics. His current research interests lie in discovering the particle nature of dark matter. He has actively worked on LZ since 2014 at both the University of Maryland and Brown University. At Maryland, he researched potential radon trapping and transporting techniques for testing LZ components. At Brown, he conducted extensive testing and analysis on LZ PMTs, determining their usabilty in the upcoming experiment.

Jeremy earned his B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Computer Engineering with a minor in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University in 2007. Jeremy joined the particle astrophysics group the summer prior to his first year as a graduate student at Brown University in 2007. Jeremy worked on a novel data acquisition system for the LUX dark matter experiment. Jeremy was also largely responsible for the WIMP search data analysis of the first LUX underground result.

In his free time Jeremy enjoys exercising, cooking, and building robots that will one day brew him beer.

He now works at Lincoln Labs.

James received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in 2009. He was awarded the Coline M. Makepeace Fellowship for his first year of graduate study at Brown University. Among other things, he was involved in the characterization of the photomultiplier tubes in the LUX experiment, design of the LED calibration system, and the development of control interfaces. He also had a major role in defining and executing the LUX data processing strategy, and led the research effort using a D-D neutron generator as a calibration source for xenon detectors.

He is now a data scientist at LinkedIn.

Carlos is originally from Mexico and earned his B.S. in Physics from Arizona State University (ASU) in 2007 (after switching from a 3rd year engineering degree). As a graduate student, Carlos wass responsible for the testing, handling and overall management of the LUX R8778 photomultiplier tubes. In addition to his interest in photodetectors, he is interested in advanced data analysis methods. Carlos was awarded a Brown Fellowship and a 3-year NSF Fellowship for research with Prof. Gaitskell.

In his free time, Carlos likes to salsa dance, take photographs and play music.

He is now a data scientist at LinkedIn.

Monica Pangilinan obtained her Ph.D on the discovery of the electroweak production of the top quark in 2010 and soon thereafter started working on LUX as a postdoc with the BrownPA group. She was looking into backgrounds for the LZ detector, coordinating the simulations effort, and into entertaining things to do at Providence.

She has now gone back to the West Coast to work in industry.

Peter worked on the XENON10 dark matter project. Thesis: “A Position-Sensitive Liquid Xenon Time-Projection Chamber for Direct Detection of Dark Matter: The XENON10 Experiment”.

Peter is now a Research Scientist at Berkeley National Lab.

Mike worked on the CDMS dark matter project. Thesis: “Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS II) – Application of Neural Networks and Wavelets to Event Analysis”.