See below two descriptions of my former research activities—one aimed towards physicists, and the other aimed towards the general public..

I was a member of the dark matter direct detection community from 2015-2025. Specifically, I used liquid noble element targets (helium and xenon) and cryogenic microelectronic devices to search for dark matter-induced nuclear recoils. I earned my Ph.D in 2022 at the University of California, Berkeley, where my advisor was Daniel McKinsey. From 2018-2020, I was the inaugural recipient of the CPAD Graduate Instrumentation Research Award. After earning my Ph.D, I became a Chamberlain Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

I was a member of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) and TESSERACT collaborations. LZ is the largest dark matter experiment in the world, with an active target volume of 7 tonnes of liquid xenon. LZ has set world-leading limits on WIMP-nucleon spin-independent interactions, as well as limits on other physics processes. I was LZ’s calibrations coordinator from 2023-24, in which role I managed our radioactive deployments and balanced operations and analysis needs. As a PhD student, I also led a comprehensive analysis to study charge-to-light-ratio and pulse-shape discrimination in xenon, and how they are affected by detector parameters like the drift electric field and light collection efficiency.

TESSERACT is working to detect sub-GeV/c^2 dark matter via cryogenic targets and transition-edge sensor (TES) readout. The project uses four targets: superfluid helium, sapphire, gallium arsenide, and germanium. It also uses cryogenic TESs to read out small energy depositions from dark matter (or other interactions), using the Quasiparticle trapping assisted Electrothermal feedback TES (QET) architecture. In 2025, TESSERACT set world-leading constraints on dark matter between 44 and 87 MeV/c^2.

The most exhilarating puzzle in modern physics (in my opinion) is that for all our successes, we still don’t know what most of the universe is made of. 85% of the matter in the universe is “dark”, meaning that it doesn’t interact with light. We know that it’s there, though, because it interacts with gravity—we can see its effects on the speed of galaxies’ rotation, the deflection of light by galaxies and galactic clusters, and even the evolution of the universe as a whole.

As a particle physicist, my focus was the nature of dark matter at the most fundamental level. What is dark matter made of? It’s not composed of atoms or their constituents (protons, neutrons, and electrons). It’s not composed of some of the more exotic particles we’ve observed, such as neutrinos. But it is almost certainly made of some individual particle or particles. (If you don’t believe me, XKCD has a succinct if snarky response.)

So what is it? No one knows, but there are ideas! One of the most popular is called the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, or WIMP. In this hypothesis, dark matter is made of fundamental particles around the mass of 100 protons—the same mass as a silver atom. These particles can interact very rarely with normal atoms through the Weak Nuclear Force. If WIMPs are real, there’s a bunch of them! In every square meter of space on Earth, there should be about 300 WIMPs. But as mentioned, they only rarely collide with matter. Over the course of your lifetime, you might only have one or two atoms in your body be hit by a WIMP; the rest will just pass through as if you weren’t even there.

To figure out what dark matter is, we build some of the most sensitive experiments in the world. The general principle is this: we assemble a large mass of some material (for example, liquid xenon), instrument it with particle detectors that can detect collisions in the material, and monitor it for a length of time (depending on the particular study, this could be days, weeks, or years). If dark matter can scatter off atomic nuclei, and if dark matter particles are passing through our solar system, then this experiment should be able to observe these interactions. This is obviously a very simple picture—complications include noise from other background interactions, the purity of the material, and the efficiency of the detectors. So we also ensure that the experiment is incredibly clean, pure of both chemical and radioactive contaminants, and shielded from external radiation. This latter criteria can be met quite robustly by going deep underground; the Earth’s crust shields our experiment from cosmic radiation. A lot of dark matter experiments are located a mile or more underground in mines!

My research specifically focused on the use of liquid xenon (a noble gas) and cryogenic (very cold) devices to search for dark matter. I focus on understanding the detectors and instrumentation we use to build these experiments. This includes studying the internal physics of noble elements and different technologies for particle detection. We have yet to observe dark matter interactions, but even the lack of a discovery is informative by allowing us to reject various physics models. Although I am now a science policy professional, the dark matter search continues!