Bio:
Michelle Dolinski, PhD, has a background in nuclear and particle physics. She has worked in the field of neutrinoless double beta decay for a decade, including graduate work on the CUORE experiment and postdoctoral research as part of the EXO group at Stanford. She joined the Drexel University Department of Physics in 2012, where she continues to pursue experimental neutrino physics. In addition, she is interested in physics education and outreach, specifically improving the accessibility and quality of physics education at the high school level.
Current Research
Dolinski is interested in designing and building novel detectors for the next generation of neutrino experiments. Neutrinos, while difficult to study in the laboratory, may be the key to understanding what lies beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
EXO-200 and nEXO are experiments searching for neutrinoless double beta decay of xenon-136. Neutrinoless double beta decay experiments probe physics beyond the Standard Model by accessing extremely high energy scales via this rare nuclear decay. The observation of neutrinoless double beta decay would prove that neutrinos are a new kind of fundamental particle called a Majorana fermion.
The PROSPECT experiment searches for neutrino oscillations to invisible "sterile" neutrinos at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Sterile neutrinos could help to explain anomalous results from previous neutrino experiments.