Current Particle Astrophysics Members:
Email addresses and home pages for members can be found on the contact page.
Physics Department Newsletter Article
Luiz has a Bachelors Degree from Clark University, where he majored in Physics and Philosophy, with a minor in Mathematics. There, he worked in the Organic Superconductors Lab headed by Prof. Charles Agosta, his advisor, doing resistivity studies on organic compounds. He joined the Brown Physics Departmen in 2001, and he was part of the XENON10 Dark Matter Experiment from the beginning. The experiment ran in the Gran Sasso national lab in Italy in 2006. Luiz spent most of the year of 2006 there, working on the deployment and running of the detector, and subsequent data analysis. He is now working in the LUX Dark Matter Experiment, a bigger and better version of the XENON10 experiment. He has spent a lot of the summer of 2008 working on the testing of the LUX detector at Case Western University, and is currently trying to finish his PhD thesis based on his XENON10 work. In both XENON10 and LUX experiments, Luiz have been involved in Background studies (Monte Carlo simulations), in DAQ development and programming, Analysis of Data for Calibration and Background identification, and Dark Matter Data Analysis.
Jeremy earned his B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Computer Engineering with a minor in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University in 2007. Upon graduation from Syracuse Jeremy was awarded the prestigious Syracuse Scholar Award. Jeremy spent his third year at City University in London, UK as a study abroad student. Upon returning to the United States Jeremy spent a summer as an REU student at Argonne National Lab under the supervision of Teng Lek Khoo working on detector calibration and data analysis of superheavy nuclei. The following year Jeremy worked as a research student in the High Energy Physics lab at Syracuse under the direction of Marina Artuso. While there he worked on a pixel detector readout system for the LHCb experiment. Jeremy's senior thesis project in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science was the design and demonstration of an intelligent traffic control network made up of multiple networked traffic sensors. For this work Jeremy and his collaborators were awarded the Best Project Award in 2006.
Jeremy joined the particle astrophysics group the summer prior to his first year as a graduate student at Brown University in 2007. Currently Jeremy is working on a novel data acquisition system for the LUX dark matter experiment. Jeremy is also testing silicon avalanche photodiodes for their application in future liquid xenon dark matter detectors.
In his free time Jeremy enjoys exercising, cooking, and building robots that will one day brew him beer.
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). During his first 2 years at ASU, he worked as a Research Assistant in the Fluid Dynamics laboratory researching vortex formation and mine burial dynamics in the ocean. After switching to Physics, Carlos worked on BLAST, a fundamental nuclear physics experiment at MIT. In the summer of 2006, he worked at MIT on the VTF Plasma Physics experiment, constructing and testing plasma detectors for the inner chamber of the Tokamak.
Carlos briefly worked on the XENON10 experiment in Gran Sasso (Italy) during the summer of 2007, and is responsible for LUX's R8778 photomultiplier tubes. In addition to his interest in photodetectors, he is interested in advanced data analysis methods.
Carlos has been awarded a Brown Fellowship and a 3-year NSF Fellowship for research with Prof. Gaitskell.
In his free time, Carlos teaches Brown's intermediate salsa class and tries to record music in his home studio.
David earned a B.S. in Engineering Physics at Syracuse University in May 2007. He worked from 2002 to 2005 in the Syracuse University Computing and Media Services department, researching Mac and PC network integration. He worked for the LIGO collaboration under Peter Saulson from 2005 to 2007 building demonstration equipment (model interferometer, feedback controller, etc). He spent the summer of 2006 at the California Institute of Technology working on the development of a noise budget for the LIGO 40-m prototype interferometer.
He is now a second-year graduate student in the Brown Particle Astrophysics group. During his first year he focused on light simulations of the XENON10 experiment in order to determine the optical properties of the detector, and extended the simulations for LUX and proposed multi-ton liquid Xe dark matter experiments. He also runs material radioactivity screenings for LUX construction at the SOudan LOw-background gamma counting facility (SOLO). He plays drums and a bare minimum of guitar and enjoys tennis, softball and frisbee.
Former Graduate Students:
(Graduated May 2008)
Worked on XENON10
Thesis: "A Position-Sensitive Liquid Xenon Time-Projection Chamber for Direct Detection of Dark Matter: The XENON10 Experiment" [pdf]
Peter is now a postdoctoral researcher at Lawernce-Livermore National Laboratory working on the LUX experiment, among other things.
Mike Attisha
(Graduated May 2006)
Worked on CDMS
Thesis: "Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS II) - Application of Neural Networks and Wavelets to Event Analysis" [pdf]
Mike gained his Masters in Physics from Warwick University in the UK, before running away to live in Australia for a year. After gaining some much needed work experience (and cash) as a software testing consultant, he came to Brown to study for his Ph.D. In his spare time (of which he has very little, of course, because he works so hard...), he enjoys playing and writing music, performing as a magician, making movies and 3-d modelling. Basically anything beginning with 'M'.
Jean-Paul Thompson
John-Paul studied at University College London (UCL) for a masters in physics from 1997-2001, and is currently studying for a Ph.D. from the high energy physics department at UCL, somehow finding his way across the Atlantic to Brown (with the help of some limes and a transinstitutional advisor).
Past Undergraduate Students:
David Jackson, Dan Butler, Aaron Weinstein, Noah Levin, Yong Wook Kim, Rob Morris, Alison Errico.
