On this page we chart the trajectories of a few of our group alumni who have left us since the beginning of the Neutrinos and Rare Event Searches Group at UTA in 2016.
Graduate students
Grant Parker, PhD 2022
Grant was a graduate student in the UTA-nuRES group. He started as a member of NEXT, working on light detection methods and event reconstruction, and later moved on to do analysis in IceCube with a focus on BSM oscillations studies such as non-standard interactions and neutrino decoherence. In 2022, Grant set the strongest limits on neutral current mu-tau flavor changing NSI in his paper, Strong constraints on neutrino nonstandard interactions from TeV-scale νμ disappearance at IceCube, a Physical Review Letters Editors’ Highlight. He is a first-author for the pending article, Searching for Decoherence from Quantum Gravity at the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, which reports the world’s leading limits on neutrino oscillation decoherence from his second dissertation analysis.
Leslie Rogers, PhD 2021 – now Maria Goeppert Meyer postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory
Leslie Rogers was a graduate student in the UTA-nuRES group. She was leading author on three papers during her PhD, and oversaw design, validation prototyping and initial production of the electroluminescent regions for the NEXT-100 TPC. She also led the team responsible for design, fabrication and commissioning of the Mothership large scale electroluminescent region test stand, and studied cosmogenic backgrounds in both NEXT-100 and ton-scale phases of NEXT. She also wrote a phenomenological paper benchmarking novel methods for cosmogenic background mitigation using neutron absorbing additives in neutrinoless double beta decay experiments.
Leslie’s graduated in December 2021 to begin a prestigious Maria Goeppert Meyer fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory, where she works in a leading role on construction of the NEXT-100 experiment and development of the NEXT-CRAB system.
Austin McDonald, PhD 2020 – now joint Harvard / UTA postdoctoral researcher
Austin McDonald was a graduate student in the UTA-nuRES group. He was leading author on five papers during his PhD, and worked to pioneer barium tagging using single molecule fluorescent imaging, including making the first demonstration of single Ba2+ detection in any medium. He also co-lead studies of the sensitivity of ton-scale NEXT detectors and made important advances in xenon gas microphysics including studying drift and diffusion in xenon-helium mixtures and co-leading development of the PyBoltz project.
Austin is now a postdoctoral researcher with a joint position Harvard University and UTA, working with Profs Jonathan Asaadi and Roxanne Guenette in the QPix Collaboration. His research focuses on neutrino detection with the QPix passive pixilation concept for DUNE, and also on UV light detection using amorphous selenium photodiodes.
Undergraduates
(since we welcome a large number of undergraduate collaborators every year, here we list the trajectories of only a handful of our longest serving members):
Manuel Rodriguez Tiscareno, Undergraduate Physics/Math 2022 – pursuing a masters in materials science.
Manuel Rodriguez Tiscareno was an undergraduate pursuing a Bachelor’s of Science in both Physics and Mathematics. Manuel is a 2019 Dell scholar and was the recipient of the Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper STEM scholarship. He worked on the 252 Cf Decay Simulator, a computational research project under Dr. Jones. He is now on a fast-track masters program in materials science at UTA.
Karla Silva, Undergraduate Biochemistry/Physics 2022 – now a graduate student at Rice University
Karla Silva was an undergraduate student at UTA in both Biochemistry and Physics. She was the 2020 recipient of the Robert F. Francis Award given by the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UTA. She worked on the optical TPC and is continuing her academic career in graduate school at Rice University.
Logan Norman, Undergraduate Physics/Engineering 2021 – now post-baccalaureate researcher at Los Alamos National Lab
Logan Norman was an undergraduate student at UTA and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics as well as mechanical engineering. While studying, Logan’s work has included development of a calibration robot for the NEXT-100 electroluminescent regions, studies of high voltage breakdown of particle detection gases, and design and fabrication of parts for the CRAB-0 program, among other contributions. He now does research in inertial confinement fusion at LANL, and plans to further his education by pursuing a PhD in Physics with a focus on nuclear fusion.
Akshat Tripathi, Undergraduate Physics 2020 – now University of Illinois Urbana Champagne graduate student in Physics
Akshat was an undergraduate student at University of Texas at Arlington pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics. As a sophomore and junior, he helped Dr. Jonathan Asaadi with various hardware and software projects to calibrate and construct different parts of LArTPCs. He worked with the UTA-nuRES group developing techniques to measure the Z coordinate of events using diffusion in NEXT-100 detector.
Akshat began his PhD in Astronomy at the Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana Champaign fall 2020. He presently works with Dr. Decker French at UIUC on post-starburst galaxies, focusing on the role that heating and shocks of molecular gas play in turning galaxies from star-forming to quiescent using data from the NIR spectrometer in Magellan.
Denise Huerta, Undergraduate Physics 2018 – now Notre Dame grad student in physics
Denise A. Huerta worked on UTA’s NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with Xenon TPC’s) research group under the guidance of Dr. Ben Jones. Her work primarily focused on the design and development of vacuum sealed PDMS membranes for the testing of fluorescent dyes in a completely dry phase. Denise presented her work at the Conference for Undergraduate Women In Physics as well UTA’s ACES symposium.
Denise will started her PhD in neutrino physics at Notre Dame University in Fall 2021. She is working with Dr Laura Fields on the Minerva and DUNE neutrino experiments. She is also the graduate representative to the National Society of Hispanic Physicists.
Ryne Dingler, Undergraduate Physics 2019 – now SMU grad student in physics
Ryne Dingler was an undergraduate physics major with a minor in mathematics at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is an alumni of the Louis Stokes Association for Minority Participation and UTA’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program as well as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar. He is the recipient of such awards as the Lockheed Martin Endowed Scholarship, the Chance Vought Endowment, the B. Cecil and J. Thompson Scholarship, the Scharf Award, and the Friends of the UTA Library Scholarship. Ryne worked on research on the NEXT experiment, including studies of cosmogenic neutron production and tests of electroluminescent of xenon-argon mixtures.
Ryne is now working towards his PhD in physics at Southern Methodist University (SMU)
Dr Ibrahim Safa, Undergraduate Physics 2017 – now a postdoc at Columbia University
Ibrahim Safa worked with the UTA-nuRES group on studies of the South Pole glacial ice optical properties for the IceCube Neutrino Telescope, in addition to laboratory R&D on performance of sodium iodide scintillation crystals under applied electric and magnetic fields.. He travelled to multiple collaboration meetings across the United States to present his work, and it led to a publication in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
After leaving the group, Ibrahim earned a PhD in Physics at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, with work with Francis Halzen, the PI of the IceCube Neutrino Telescope and Carlos Argüelles. He studied neutrino point sources and neutrino dark matter interactions, with both experimental and phenomenological approaches. He is now a postdoc at Columbia University in New York.
Sanmitra Pingulkar, Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering 2020 – now professional mechanical engineer at Square Roots Inc.
Sanmitra Pingulkar was an undergraduate researcher studying Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas at Arlington. He worked as an Engineering assistant in the NEXT collaboration at UTA. He worked on designs for the NEXT-100 electroluminescence regions including the large-scale Mothership test system for high pressure gas detector QA/QC in the high pressure xenon gas laboratory.
Sanmitra is now a Mechanical Engineer at Square Roots MicroGreens in Brooklyn, NYC