Daniel Whiteson

Career Frederick Reines Halls, which houses the Physics and Astronomy Department at UCI. Whiteson is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCI. He is also the Vice-chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCI.

In November 2013, Whiteson and Michael Mulhearn, a physicist at University of California, Davis, had the idea of using phones to detect ultra high energy cosmic rays. Whiteson and Mulhearn created an app called CRAYFIS, which stands for Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones. The app uses the CMOS chip inside phone cameras to detect high energy particles left over by ultra high energy cosmic rays. This data is then analyzed to learn more about the cosmic ray that produced those high energy particles.

Media ventures In 2008, Whiteson started working with cartoonist Jorge Cham. Whiteson and Cham have written two books together, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe in 2018 and Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe in 2021. Whiteson, along with Cham, is a co-creator of Elinor Wonders Why, an animated educational television show on PBS Kids. Whiteson chose PBS Kids specifically to reach the children of low-income families. The podcast ended in October 2024, and Whiteson started a new podcast called Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, hosted by Whiteson and biologist Kelly Weinersmith.

Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality, a book by Whiteson and Andy Warner, was released in 2025. Warner is a cartoonist and illustrated the book.

Awards and honors Whiteson was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016 for "leadership in searches for new physics and early studies of top quark mass and cross-section at the Tevatron Collider and Large Hadron Collider, both experimental and phenomenological, particularly searches for dark matter; for innovative applications of ideas from machine learning; and for nontraditional efforts in outreach."

In 2010, Whiteson was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Personal life He is married to Katrine Whiteson, an associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UCI.

Selected publications

Articles

Books We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe. By Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. New York City: Riverhead Books, 2017. Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe. By Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. New York: Riverhead Books, 2021. Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality. By Daniel Whiteson and Andy Warner. W. W. Norton and Company, 2025.