Ansh Desai

Hello! I'm an experimental particle physicist hunting for dark matter. I grew up in Colorado and studied physics at the University of Colorado as a Boettcher Scholar, picking up minors in math and computer science along the way. 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.

Right now I work on two experiments at once. With Tien-Tien Yu and the SENSEI collaboration I 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. With Eric Torrence and the FASER collaboration I look for dark matter produced in the highest-energy collisions at the LHC. That same detector caught the very first collider neutrinos anyone has ever seen!

I'm not always behind a laptop. I spent a year at Fermilab in the CCD lab trying to understand the tiny backgrounds that hold these searches back, and I genuinely love getting hands-on with hardware. I also work on the theory side that tells experiments like ours where to point, including a public code package I wrote for calculating dark matter signals. All in all I've been lucky to author or co-author 10+ peer-reviewed papers with some very talented people.