Dr. Jun Cao
Jun Cao is a professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences. He got his PhD in Phenomenological Particle Physics at IHEP in 1998. As a postdoctoral researcher of the Linear Accelerator Laboratory (LAL, Orsay) in France, he worked for the H1 experiment at DESY from 1998 to 2000 and, as a postdoctoral researcher of University of Michigan for MiniBooNE at Fermilab from 2001 to 2004. Dr. Cao became a staff member of IHEP and joined the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in 2004.
He led the antineutrino detector design and construction, liquid scintillator production, and data analysis of Daya Bay. He was awarded the C.N. Yang award of the Association of Asia-Pacific Physical Societies in 2013 for his contributions to Daya Bay. He is currently Deputy Director of the Experimental Physics Center of IHEP, co-spokesperson of Daya Bay, and deputy project manager of Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO).
Dr. Mohammad Sajjad Athar
M. Sajjad Athar is a Professor of Physics at the Department of Physics, Aligarh Muslim University and is teaching to undergraduate and postgraduate classes for about 25 years and doing research in the area of hadron physics and neutrino physics. He mainly works in the area of electromagnetic and weak interactions from nucleons and nuclei and has contributed in the understanding of nuclear medium effects in quasielastic, inelastic and deep inelastic processes. He is a member of NuSTEC(Neutrino Theory-Experiment Collaboration) Board. He is among the scientists working on the development of GENIE (Generates Events for Neutrino Interaction Experiments) a universal object-oriented neutrino MC generator. In the collaboration of T. Kajita and M. Honda he is involved in the prediction of atmospheric muons and neutrino fluxes for the various observational sites where neutrino experiments are being planned or performed. He is also a member of MINERvA collaboration.
Dr. Manfred Lindner, Co-Chair
Manfred Lindner is director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg, Germany. He received his PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. After working at Fermilab and CERN he returned to Germany where he held a professor position at the Technical University Munich, before joining MPIK in 2006. Manfred Lindner works on theoretical and experimental particle and astro-particle physics. The theoretical studies concern both formal and phenomenological questions in the standard model of particle physics and its extensions. On the experimental side he and his research division make leading contributions to international projects in the field of neutrino physics and dark matter search. Manfred Lindner is co-spokesperson of the XENON collaboration which operates most sensitive detectors for the direct detection of dark matter. In neutrino physics he and his group make/made strong contributions to Double Chooz, GERDA/LEGEND200, STEREO and CONUS. He was awarded a honorary doctorate from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm for his important contributions to neutrino physics. He was also chair of the leading international conference on neutrino physics in 2018 in Heidelberg (NEUTRINO 2018).
Dr. Sam Zeller
Sam Zeller received a Ph.D. in particle physics from Northwestern University in 2002. Her dissertation, a measurement of the weak mixing angle in neutrino scattering, earned the Tanaka prize in 2003 and has been cited over 600 times. She worked at both Columbia University and Los Alamos National Lab prior to joining the scientific staff at Fermilab in 2009. She has participated in 7 different experiments studying the properties of neutrinos over the course of her career. In 2012, she received a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career award to further the study of neutrino interactions using liquid argon time projection chambers and is Co-Spokesperson of the MicroBooNE experiment. Her current research focuses on neutrino-nucleus interactions and precision neutrino oscillation measurements. She is also Deputy Head of the Fermilab Neutrino Division.
Dr. Walter Winter
Walter Winter is a staff scientist in theoretical astroparticle physics at DESY. He received his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich (Germany) in 2003. He then was a Postdoc at IAS Princeton (USA) before he moved to the University of Wuerzburg receiving the prestigious DFG-funded Emmy Noether- and Heisenberg fellowships. He was furthermore awarded a European Union-funded ERC Consolidator grant, titled “Neutrinos and the origin of the cosmic rays”, in 2015.
Winter’s research in neutrino physics phenomenology has spanned an extremely wide range, from neutrino oscillations, over the theory of neutrino mass, to the origin of the astrophysical neutrinos measured by IceCube – documented in more than 160 publications with over 10000 citations. For example, Winter is one of the co-authors of the GLoBES (“General Long Baseline Experiment Simulator”) software.
Dr. Kate Scholberg
Kate Scholberg is an Arts and Sciences Professor of Physics and Bass Fellow at Duke University. She received a B.Sc. in Physics from McGill University in 1989. She then attended Caltech, receiving an M.S. in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1997 for thesis research on the MACRO experiment at Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy. As a research associate at Boston University, she joined the Super-Kamiokande collaboration. She was Assistant Professor at MIT from 2000-2004 before moving to Duke University. A recipient of the DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator and NSF CAREER awards, she is currently a member of the Super-Kamiokande, T2K, and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment collaborations, and served as spokesperson of the COHERENT experiment at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She coordinates the SuperNova Early Warning System, an international network of supernova neutrino detectors. She was elected as an APS Fellow in 2013 and was a recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in 2015 as a member of Super-Kamiokande and T2K. She is Past Chair of the National Organizing Committee of the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics.
Dr. Mikhail Danilov
Graduated from Moscow State University (Department Chair B.Pontecorvo). Diploma Thesis on the search for muon decay into electron and gamma. PhD from Inst. for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Moscow) on Measurement of π- p backward scattering at the Serpukhov accelerator. Participated in several experiments including ARGUS, H1, HERA-B, BELLE(2), EXO, CMS, DANSS and in several R&D projects including RD-40 and CALICE.
Professor at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology since 1993, Chair of the Particle Physics Department, Professor at the National Nuclear Research University MEPhI, Supervised 20 PhD students who already got their degrees. Director of 28 ITEP and Moscow Schools of Physics (1990 – till now).
Principal researcher at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Employed by ITEP since 1973 till 2015, Vice Director 1991-1997, Director 1997-2001, Research Director 2001-2013.
Full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Laureate of the Max Planck Research Award.
Dr. Takaaki Kajita, Co-Chair
Takaaki Kajita has been studying neutrinos with Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande. In particular, he has been studying atmosphericneutrinos.
Dr. Nigel Smith, Co-Chair
Nigel Smith joined SNOLAB as Director during July 2009. He currently holds a full Professorship at Laurentian University, adjunct Professor status at Queen’s University, and a visiting Professorial chair at Imperial College, London. He received his Bachelor of Science in physics from Leeds University in the U.K. in 1985 and his Ph. D. in astrophysics from Leeds in 1991. He has served as a lecturer at Leeds University, a research associate at Imperial College London, group leader (dark matter) and deputy Division Head at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, before relocating to Canada to oversee the SNOLAB deep underground facility.
Dr. Smith has undertaken astroparticle physics research in extreme locations throughout his career, studying astronomical sources of ultra high energy gamma rays using a telescope at the South Pole, searching for Galactic dark matter using detectors located 1100m underground at the Boulby facility in the U.K., and subsequently overseeing dark matter and neutrinos studies 2km underground at the SNOLAB facility in Canada. In 1987 he “wintered-over” as the sole operator of the telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station, being the first Briton to successfully winter at the Pole itself.
As Executive Director, Dr. Smith has full directorial and operational responsibility for the SNOLAB underground facility hosted at the Vale Creighton mine, supporting a fully international science programme. He is accountable for the development and execution of the strategic direction for the SNOLAB facility and its science programme/. He has responsibility for deriving facility funding, overseeing management and operations, and development of the science programme itself. He supports the scientific community by serving on several (currently 9) peer review, agency science strategy and institute board and oversight committees. In May 2019, he was appointed as a CIFAR fellow in the Earth 4D: Subsurface Science & Exploration research programme.
Dr. Thomas Brunner
Thomas Brunner is an Assistant Professor at McGill. He received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the Technical University Munich. His research focuses on learning more about the nature of neutrinos by studying radioactive beta decays. He is a member of the EXO-200 and nEXO collaborations, which are trying to observe a lepton number violating 0νββ in the isotope 136Xe.
Dr. Heidi Schellman
Dr. Schellman is a Professor and Head of the Department of Physics at Oregon State University. She received her doctorate in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. Her research interest is in the intersection of strong and weak interactions of elementary particles. Over the past 30 years, she has led campaigns to measure the Weinberg Angle, which describes the mixing between electromagnetic and weak forces, in several experiments, first in a neutrino-nucleus scattering experiment, NuTev, at Fermilab and then through measurements of the W boson mass and Z boson couplings at the Tevatron Proton-Anti-proton collider. All of these measurements required careful study of the strong interaction physics of quarks inside protons and nuclei to extract the weak interaction signal. Her current research program consists of the MINERvA and DUNE experiments at Fermilab which are searching for evidence of CP violation in neutrino scattering, which may explain the matter-anti-matter asymmetry in the Universe. MINERvA is doing a careful study of strong interaction effects in neutrino scattering which will lead to better understanding of precision CP violation physics when DUNE comes online in the mid 2020’s.
Dr. Steven W. Barwick
Education:
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1986
B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981
Professor Steven Barwick braves the fierce wind chill on a vast Antarctic ice shelf to capture one of science’s most elusive prey: ghostly particles called neutrinos that could carry secrets from the depths of the universe.
By peering through deep Antarctic ice, detector arrays such as IceCube can record tell-tale flashes of blue light that are signs of neutrinos, so ghostly they barely interact with matter at all – except those rare moments when, in their streaming trillions, one of them bumps into an atomic nucleus in the ice. Untouched by dust or radiation, neutrinos flowing constantly through the Earth, and our bodies, might bear secrets from the beginning of time.
Barwick has spent almost 25 years working in Antarctica with a focus on developing a new astronomy based on detecting neutrinos, rather than the more familiar light. He was the co-spokesperson from 1995-2000 for the pioneering AMANDA detector located about 1 mile beneath the snow surface at the South Pole. He then participated in the landmark IceCube detector, also located at the South Pole, which recently reported evidence for high-energy neutrinos from outside the solar system. Currently, Barwick is leading an International effort to use radio technology as the heart of the novel neutrino telescope called ARIANNA, which is the size of Irvine. It will be located about 65 miles from McMurdo, the largest U.S. research station in Antarctica.
Dr. Kenneth Long
Ken Long is Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Imperial College London. Having studied the hadronic final states produced in deep inelastic muon-proton scattering as a graduate student at Oxford, he went to CERN in 1985 to work on the UA1 experiment. Returning to the UK in 1987, he joined the ZEUS experiment at DESY in Hamburg, contributing to the design and construction of the experiment, the development of the reconstruction and simulation software, the measurement of the structure of both the proton and the photon and making detailed studies of the electroweak interaction.
Fascinated by the mysteries hinted at by the discovery of neutrino oscillations at the turn of the century, he played a leading role in the development of the techniques required to produce intense beams of high-energy neutrinos on an industrial scale at the Neutrino Factory. In this context he chairs the International Design Study for the Neutrino Factory (the IDS-NF), is the UK PI for the international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment that is under construction at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and is co-chair of the national and Anglo-American Proton Accelerators for Science and Innovation (PASI) collaborations.
Dr. Marek Kowalski
In June 2014, Marek Kowalski officially took up office as a Leading Scientist in the IceCube group in Zeuthen. He graduated there in 2004 within IceCube’s predecessor project, AMANDA, and is thus an old hand at DESY. After his professorships at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the USA, Humboldt University (HU) of Berlin and his W3 professorship at the University of Bonn, he now assumes a joint professorship at HU Berlin and DESY. His focus is on the future expansion of IceCube at the geographic South Pole. Apart from his research in neutrino astronomy and observational cosmology, Kowalski will bring an ambitious new project to DESY: the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) – planned in cooperation with Caltech (USA), the Oscar Klein Centre (Sweden) and the Weizmann Institute (Israel) – is an instrument for an all-sky survey with a novel 1.6-gigapixel camera. Kowalski will take data allowing pioneering observations in supernova cosmology, that are also important for neutrino astronomy.
Dr. Kunio Inoue
Kunio Inoue is a full professor of Research Center for Neutrino Science, Tohoku University since 2004. He serves as Director of the center and Spokesperson of the KamLAND experiment since 2006. He is also a PI of Kavli IPMU, The University of Tokyo since 2007 and a leader of Graduate Program on Physics for the Universe since 2017.
He received his Bachelor and Master degree of Science in physics from Osaka University and Doctoral degree of Science from The University of Tokyo in 1994. He joined the Kamiokande group for his doctoral study by typing a shutdown command for Kamiokande-2. He pursued solar neutrino research in Kamiokande-3 and continued it in Super-Kamiokande. He is one of the first onsite residents for the Super-Kamiokande experiment. He joined KamLAND in 1998 and main research subjects have been shifted to reactor neutrino oscillation and geo-neutrino observation. He started the KamLAND-Zen project for neutrino-less double beta decay search in 2009 and is a spokesperson of it since then.
He has been awarded several prizes, Asahi prize for “discovery of neutrino mass” as a member of Super-Kamiokande group in 1998, the first Koshiba prize for “LS development for reactor neutrino disappearance” in 2004, Distinguished professor in Tohoku University during 2008-2010 and 2011-2013, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Prize for “Precision measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation” in 2009, Nishina memorial Prize in 2012 and Totsuka Prize in 2013 for “Geo-neutrino observation” and The 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for “Investigation of neutrino oscillation” as a member of KamLAND and Super-Kamiokande group in 2015.
Dr. Seon-Hee Seo
Dr. Seon-Hee (a.k.a. Sunny) Seo has been working on neutrino physics since 2004, starting with the IceCube neutrino telescope where she pioneered ultra-high energy tau neutrino searches as well as designing and implementing the global trigger system. After IceCube, Sunny joined the RENO reactor neutrino experiment in 2012 where she contributed to the first spectral measurement of theta_13 and dm^2_ee in RENO. Her pioneering study on the 5 MeV excess of the reactor neutrino prompt energy spectrum and its announcement at Neutrino 2014 in Boston was a big surprise to the neutrino community and has triggered many follow-up studies in both theory and experiment. These studies are on-going to understand the physics of this excess. After RENO, Sunny joined NEOS experiment in its phase II (NEOS-II) to search for eV scale sterile neutrinos, where she is responsible for successful re-installation and operation of the experiment as a co-PI of this project. Sunny also proposed the “Hyper-K second detector in Korea” at the Hyper-K collaboration meeting in London in 2016, and her proposal was officially accepted by the collaboration. Since then she has been serving as the convener of the working group, Hyper-K second detector in Korea, a.k.a. T2HKK or KNO. Sunny is currently an IUPAP (International Union of Physics and Applied Physics) C4 (astroparticle physics commission) member. She also has been serving as an international advisory committee member or (co-)convener for many prestigious international conferences/workshops. In 2018, Sunny was the first recipient of the “Female Scientist Award” given by FKPPL (France-Korea Particle Physics Laboratory).
Dr. Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille
Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille is a cosmologist at CEA-Saclay (France). She obtained a joint PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago and University Paris 7 in 1997. She led the site evaluation studies for the high-energy neutrino detector ANTARES from 1998 to 2004. Since then, she is focusing on observational cosmology, in particular on dark matter and dark energy. She worked in the Supernova Legacy survey experiment, and since 2010 is heavily involved in the large-scale structure BOSS and eBOSS surveys of the SDSS, and on the dark energy spectroscopic instrument DESI.
She has been awarded on several occasions: from the French Physical Society for her PhD work in 1997, from the Academy of Science of Lyon for her research in 2010, for her contributions to public outreach in 2012. In 2017, she was awarded the Irene Joliot Curie award as Scientific Women of the year from the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Industry. She became a member of the French Academy of Science in 2020. Her present research is mostly devoted to constraints on neutrino mass and dark matter from the study of matter clustering in the Universe. She is currently co-spokesperson of the DESI collaboration.
Dr. Werner Rodejohann
Werner Rodejohann leads a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg, Germany. He received his PhD in 2001 from Dortmund university. Having obtained an ERC Starting Grant as well as a Heisenberg fellowship of the DFG, his research focusses on theoretical and phenomenological neutrino physics, dark matter and other beyond the Standard Model aspects. He is also a member of the KATRIN collaboration.
Dr. Renata Zukanovich Funchal
Dr. Zuchanovich Funchal received her Baccalaureate in physics from the University of São Paulo (1985) and Doctorate in physics from the Université de Paris XI (Paris-Sud) in 1991. She is currently a full professor at the University of São Paulo. Her research focus is on specific reactions and phenomenology of particles, acting on the following subjects: z0 physics, z0 decays, z0 hadronic decays, neutrino physics and neutrino flavour oscillations.