Risa Wechsler

Risa H. Wechsler is an American cosmological physicist, Professor of Physics at Stanford University, and Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She is the director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.

Education & Career Wechsler earned her S.B. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, and earned her Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2001. and an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the Enrico Fermi Institute. She has pursued many collaborative research projects in the course of which she has served as Co-Spokesperson for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Collaboration (2014-2018) and has worked on the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration and the Dark Sky Simulations on the Titan Supercomputer. She founded the Satellites Around Galactic Areas (SAGA) Survey with Marla Geha, and helped initiate the Dark Energy Survey in 2004.

Recognition Member, National Academy of Sciences, elected 2025 Outstanding Leader Award, Stanford Faculty Women's Forum, 2023 Distinguished Alumna, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2022 and the Science Channel program called Space's Deepest Secrets: Secret History of the Big Bang. In 2012, she spoke on the PBS series Science Bytes: Dark Matters

Wechsler also collaborated with the artist Oxossi Ayofemi on an art exhibit entitled Black Matter'', exhibited from July 2018 to January 2020 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The show combined discussions about the elusive nature of the universe's dark matter with notions of presence and absence in African American culture.