Karsten Heeger

Karsten Heeger
Heeger in 2022
Born	Karsten Miklas Heeger Germany
Alma mater	Oxford University (B.A.), University of Washington (Ph.D.)
Awards	Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016) Sloan Research Fellowship (2009)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics (nuclear physics)
Institutions	University of Wisconsin–Madison (2006 – 2013) Yale University (2013 – )
Doctoral advisor	Hamish Robertson
Website	https://heegerlab.yale.edu/

Karsten M. Heeger is a German–American physicist and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University, where he also serves as both chair of the Yale Department of Physics and director of Wright Laboratory.^[1] His work is primarily in the area of neutrino physics, focusing on the study of neutrino oscillations, neutrino mass, and dark matter.^[2]

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.^[2]

Heeger has served on national and international committees including the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC), the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) Executive Committee, and the American Physical Society (APS) Committee on International Scientific Affairs. He served as the Deputy Chair of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) from 2022 to 2023. Heeger was a member of the 2015 Nuclear Physics Long Range Planning Group and the US ATLAS Project Advisory Group, and has served on review committees for the United States Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC). He is co-chair of the APS DPF Coordinating Panel of Advanced Detectors (CPAD).^[2]

Prof. Heeger has been the director of the Yale Wright Laboratory since 2013 and was named chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University in 2019.

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.^[2]

Heeger is studying the nature of neutrinos with the CUORE double beta decay experiment, performing R&D with Project 8 towards a novel experiment to measure neutrino mass,^[2] and assembling Charge Readout Planes at Yale Wright Laboratory for the DUNE detectors, which is an experiment that will enable the study of the matter-antimatter imbalance in the Universe and determine the ordering of neutrino mass states.

Heeger is co-Principal Investigator of CUORE, along with Reina Maruyama. Since 2021, he has also served as a co-spokesperson for the CUPID experiment, the successor to CUORE. From 2015 to 2024, Heeger was the PI and spokesperson of the PROSPECT experiment, which aims to make a precision measurement of reactor antineutrinos and search for sterile neutrinos^[3] 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.^[4][2]

Heeger’s research work has been recognized with numerous awards. For his thesis work he was awarded the 2003 APS Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics. In 2008 he received Outstanding Junior Investigator awards from DOE Nuclear Physics for the investigation of neutrino properties with bolometric detectors and from DOE High Energy Physics for the measurement of the neutrino mixing angle theta13 at Daya Bay. Heeger was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2009 and a UW Romnes Faculty Fellowship in 2011. He was named a Kavli Fellow in 2012. In 2013, he was named an American Physical Society (APS) fellow, nominated by the Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) "for his contributions to the highest impact experiments in neutrino physics, especially for the major roles he played in the Daya Bay and KamLAND experiments". Heeger shared the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as a member of three collaborations: SNO, KamLAND, and Daya Bay.^[2]

A list of selected publications can be found on INSPIRE-HEP.^[2]

Heeger married experimental physicist, Reina Maruyama, in 2004.^[5]