Katelin Schutz

Schutz grew up in rural western New York in the Finger Lakes region.[5] A voracious reader, she was interested in math and space. At age 16, she wanted a telescope. She describes herself as a "foodie".[4][6] In 2010, she graduated from Allendale Columbia School[7] where she was captain of the swim team.[8]

She attended MIT, where she did research with Max Tegmark, Alan Guth, David Kaiser,[9] and Tracy Slatyer.[10] She was awarded a Hertz Fellowship in 2014.[11] She did her PhD with Hitoshi Murayama at UC Berkeley.[5] She also won a NSF fellowship.[3] She completed her thesis in 2019, titled "Searching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe."[1]

Schutz will join McGill University[12] in Montreal as assistant professor in August 2021 as part of the Centre for High Energy Physics and in the McGill Space Institute.[13][14]

To use the cosmos as a laboratory for studying tiny particles, Schutz' research combines particle physics and cosmology. For example, she was very excited by LIGO's first observation of gravitational waves, because she had already been synthesizing data from spinning pulsars to identify potential nearby binary black holes.[15] She said, "LIGO's discovery is really exciting because ... it means gravitational waves are out there, just waiting to be observed."[4]

Schutz' studies extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics known as dark matter that might interact only weakly or indirectly with familiar matter made of quarks and leptons. For example, her research asks whether such dark matter particles might experience new forces outside of the Standard Model, and how we might detect such interactions. In particular, such particles might interact with standard matter via gravity, and such interactions may provide a "gravitational portal between dark and visible matter" that we can observe via astronomy, e.g. stars and galaxies, including nearby dwarf galaxies and the Milky Way itself, and also large-scale cosmological structures, such as the CMB, the Lyman-alpha forest, and the cosmological 21 cm line.[16] Schutz and colleagues have pointed out that if dark matter consists of particles that are far lighter than electrons, then the Standard Model could create dark matter through feeble interactions at low temperature known as freeze-in.[17][18][19][20] She has also studied strongly interacting massive particles as a dark matter candidate.[21]

Her research has also identified mechanisms for indirectly detecting dark matter particles through a two-excitation process in superfluid helium.[22][23]

She and her colleagues also simulate galactic halos,[24] and have used data from Gaia to observationally constrained the existence of a dark matter disk in the Milky Way.[25][26]

Schutz has received a UC Berkeley's Brantley-Tuttle Tahoe Fellowship, Hertz Foundation Fellowship,[4] National Science Foundation Fellowship,<rev name=NSF.2014/> NASA Einstein Fellowship, and is currently a Pappalardo post-doctoral fellow in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. She was named a 2019 Rising Star in physics by the Stanford and MIT Departments of Physics.[27] APS awarded her the Sakurai Dissertation Prize.[5]

• Katelin Schutz publications indexed by Google Scholar
• katelinschutz.com