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.

Chongwen obtained his B.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in December 2020. His undergraduate research focused on the formation and evolution of large-scale structures in the universe. He joined the Brown PA group in 2021 and has been actively involved in the LZ dark matter experiment. Currently, he is working on testing of photomultiplier tubes and data analysis.

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.

Nat started his Ph.D. program at Brown University in September 2018. Upon the arrival, Nat joined the particle astrophysics group under Richard Gaitskell and has been actively involved in both software and hardware aspects of LZ dark matter project.

Prior to joining Brown, Nat received an A.A. degree from Montgomery College in 2014 and B.S. degrees (advisor: Carter Hall) from UMD in physics and astronomy, graduating with highest honors in 2018. His undergraduate thesis was on Krypton Ingress Surveillance of Prototype LUX-ZEPLIN Cylinder.

In the minute free time Nat has, he either plays music or goes hiking and rock climbing.

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!

Jun joined the Brown Particleastrophysics group in the spring of 2017, where he took on roles helping to test and document the LED calibration system and contributing to the LUX effective field theory (EFT) analysis group. Jun also helped manage the PMT testing and array assembly programs.

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.

Simon Fiorucci obtained his Ph.D. on the cryogenic dark matter experiment EDELWEISS in 2005. He joined the BrownPA group at the end of 2005 to work as a post-doc on XENON10. This had him full-time in Italy at the Gran Sasso lab for the next two years. He worked on LUX at Brown, specifically on the underground lab design and construction, and on background studies.

He served as Commissioning Director for the LUX underground installation, and as Science Coordinator when it started running.He now works as the LZ Operations Manager at Berkeley National Lab.

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.

Dave earned a B.S. in Engineering Physics with a minor in mathematics from Syracuse University in 2007. His work in the Particle Astrophysics group focused on Monte Carlo simulations of detector response, including light propagation, backgrounds, and calibrations. He also remotely managed the material screening program using the SOudan LOw-Background Counting Facility (SOLO) located at the Soudan Underground Lab.

He now works at Lincoln Labs.

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.

Luiz worked on both the XENON10 and LUX dark matter projects. Thesis: “Optimization of Signal versus Background in Liquid Xe Detectors Used for Dark Matter Direct Detection Experiments”.

Luiz is now a professor at Penn State University, working on LZ and Project 8.

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.