Ansh Desai

Hello! I'm an experimental particle physicist focused on probing the nature of dark matter. I grew up in Colorado and studied physics at the University of Colorado as a Boettcher Scholar, with minors in math and computer science. I spent a year in a masters program at Stony Brook in New York, which is where I really got interested in working with dark matter detectors, and this brought me to the University of Oregon for my PhD.

I work with Tien-Tien Yu and the SENSEI collaboration to look for dark matter floating around in our own galaxy, using ultra-sensitive silicon detectors deep underground. SENSEI revolutionized the search for sub-GeV dark matter, and we have been continuing to set new constraints on sub-GeV dark matter searches at SNOLAB. I also work with Eric Torrence and the FASER collaboration to look for dark matter produced in the highest-energy collisions at the LHC, and FASER was the first experiment to directly observe neutrinos produced at a collider!

I also spent a year at Fermilab in the CCD lab working to understand the low-energy backgrounds that limit these searches, and I really enjoy working hands-on with hardware. On the theory side, I work on predicting what dark matter signals should look like in experiments like ours, and I wrote a public code package for calculating these signals. All in all I've been lucky to author or co-author 10+ peer-reviewed papers with some very talented people.