World Science Festival Salon: The Mystery of Dark Matter

Elena Aprile is a professor of physics at Columbia University and is internationally recognized for her experimental work with noble liquid detectors for research in gamma-ray astrophysics and particle astrophysics. She is the founder and spokesperson of the XENON Dark Matter experiment.

Glennys Farrar is a collegiate professor of physics at New York University. She has made seminal contributions to theoretical particle physics, including demonstrating that quarks are not just mathematical constructs but are actually physically present in matter and pioneering the search for supersymmetry.

MIT physicist Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano works at the intersection of cosmology, particle physics, astronomy, and engineering.

Katherine Freese is the George E. Uhlenbeck Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan and Visiting Professor of Physics at Stockholm University. She works on a wide range of topics in theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics. She has been working to identify the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the universe, as well as to build a successful model for the early universe immediately after the Big Bang.

Jocelyn Monroe is an assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science who works on experimental searches for new particles. Her current research focus is on directly detecting dark matter particle interactions with the MiniCLEAN and DMTPC experiments.

Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor at the Department of Astronomy and Physics at Yale. She is a theoretical astrophysicist interested in cosmology, gravitational lensing, and black hole physics.