People
Shawn Westerdale
Assistant Professor of Physics
Shawn's (he/him) research focuses on dark matter and neutrinos, as well as R&D developing low-threshold and low-background detectors. In 2011, he got his S.B. in from MIT, where he switched from a Nuclear Engineering to a Physics major after being captivated by the hunt for dark matter. He completed his Ph.D. at Princeton in 2016. He spent 3 years in Canada as a postdoc at Carleton U. in Ottawa, followed by an INFN fellowship at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Cagliari, Italy, with a visiting postdoc position at Princeton, which he turned into a one year term as an associate research scholar before coming to UCR.
Postdocs
You?
We are currently looking for postdocs. If you're interested, reach out to Shawn Westerdale at shawn.westerdale@ucr.edu
Graduate Students
Alec Peck
Alec (he/him) has previously worked with the ALICE collaboration at CERN and now works under UCR's Dr. Shawn Westerdale, prospectively on the DarkSide-20k experiment. Alec is continuing research into direct detection of dark matter particles and includes the development of the outer veto for the next generation DarkSide experiment.
Veronika Shalamova
[in progress]
Taisiia Smirnova
[in progress]
You?
We are currently looking for graduate students. If you're interested, reach out to Shawn Westerdale at shawn.westerdale@ucr.edu
Undergraduate Students
Manuel Bostock
[in progress]
Nathan Culman
[in progress]
Sarah Howick
[in progress]
Jared Hudnall
Jared Hudnall (he/him) is a current undergraduate physics major. He is currently working on the mechanical design of the DarkSide-20k outer veto.
Ryan Krismer
Ryan is a current undergraduate physics and astronomy major at the University of Washington, participating in an astrophysics REU at UCR. He is using GEANT4 to simulate and characterize energy spectra of backgrounds that occur in a LArTPC placed near a nuclear reactor.
Andrew Le Blanc
Andrew (he/him) is a current undergraduate physics major. He is currently working on a search for 8B solar electron neutrinos capturing on 40Ar using the DEAP-3600 detector. He is focusing on backgrounds due to the pile-up of gamma-ray signals in the detector. He can be contacted at andrewfleblanc@gmail.com
Bill Murray
[in progress]
Leo Weimer
Leo is an undergraduate student from West Virginia University working with the UCR dark matter lab as part of the Physics and Astronomy REU. His research project involves finding and correcting errors in the way Geant4, a particle physics simulation software, simulates neutron capture reactions and the resulting de-excitation cascades an isotope undergoes.
Matthew Lugatiman
Matthew Lugatiman is a junior who switched his major from biology to physics starting sophomore year. He is working on the theoretical work for Dark Matter and serves as an undergraduate research assistant under Dr. Westerdale and Dr. Tanedo. He also plans to work on the firmware for the dark matter detector. He can be contacted at mluga002@ucr.edu
You?
We are currently looking for undergraduate students. If you're interested, reach out to Shawn Westerdale at shawn.westerdale@ucr.edu
High School Students
Dhruv Trivedi
Dhruv is a high school senior at the Haker School in San Jose, California. He is working on Neucbot and updating it so it is compatible with the latest python version.
Yousif Najat
[in progress]
Vignesh Balaji
Vignesh is a high school senior at Foothill High School in Pleasanton, California. He worked on creating the internal page and updating the experiments section for the Darkside-20k, DarkSide-LowMass, DUNE, and Scintillating Bubble Neutrinos. He also helped fix bugs in NeuCBOT and update it to Nudat3.
Former Undergraduate Students
