Prize Recipient

Elise Novitski
University of Washington

"For the development and analysis of the Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy method and its application to the measurement of neutrino mass."

Elise Novitski is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Washington. Her research uses precision low-energy experiments to investigate elementary particle properties and fundamental symmetries. She earned her bachelor's degree at Yale University in 2008, then taught at Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore for one year. During her PhD at Harvard University, she worked on Penning-trap-based antihydrogen experiments and measurements of the electron and positron magnetic dipole moments, which test quantum electrodynamics and CPT invariance. She was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and awarded a Merit Fellowship by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. In 2018 she became the Robertson Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she became a research assistant professor in 2022 and took her current position in 2023. Her work, as part of the Project 8 and He6-CRES Collaborations, uses the Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy technique to precisely observe the energies of electrons emitted in beta decay. This enables the direct measurement of the neutrino mass and a test of the symmetries of the weak interaction. She is a member of the American Physical Society's DNP and DAMOP and is a Member-At-Large for the GPMFC.