Karsten Heeger

Karsten M. Heeger is a German–American physicist and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University, where he serves as director of Wright Laboratory and co-director of the Yale Center for the Invisible Universe. His work is primarily in the area of neutrino physics, focusing on the study of neutrino oscillations, neutrino mass, and dark matter.

Education and career Prof. Heeger received his undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford University and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he worked on a model-independent measurement of the solar 8B neutrino flux in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). Before joining the faculty at Yale University, he was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin and a Chamberlain Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2024, he has served as co-director of the Yale Center for the Invisible Universe.

Research Professor Heeger's research focuses on the study of neutrino oscillations and neutrino mass. He was involved in the resolution of the solar neutrino problem with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), the first observation of reactor antineutrino oscillation with KamLAND, and the first measurement of the neutrino mixing angle q13 with Daya Bay. at very short baselines.

As a graduate student, Heeger worked on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, where his dissertation on a measurement of the 8B solar neutrino flux was awarded the 2003 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics by the American Physical Society.