Daniel N. McKinsey joined the Physics Department faculty at the University of California Berkeley in July 2015. He received a B.S. in Physics with highest honors at the University of Michigan in 1995. His Ph.D. was awarded by Harvard University in 2002, with a thesis on the magnetic trapping, storage, and detection of ultracold neutrons in superfluid helium. His postdoctoral research was performed at Princeton University, and in 2003 he joined the Yale University physics department, where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2014. McKinsey is a leader in the field of direct searches for dark matter interactions, and serves as Co-Spokesperson of the LUX experiment. He was awarded a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and served on the 2013-2014 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5).
McKinsey's research centers on non-accelerator particle physics, particle astrophysics, and low temperature physics. In particular, his work is on the development, construction, and operation of new detectors using liquefied noble gases, which are useful in looking for physics beyond the Standard Model. Applications include the search for dark matter interactions with ordinary matter, searches for neutrinoless double beta decay, and the measurement of the low energy solar neutrino flux. He is especially interested in the physics of the response of liquefied noble gases to particle interactions, the calibration of these detectors so as to understand their response, and the overall development of new experimental techniques for reaching sensitivity to extremely rare, low-energy particle interactions.
Credit: http://physics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/daniel-mckinsey