Expertise

Topics:  Dark Matter, Physics, Space, Cosmology, Astrophysics

Industries: Research, Education/Learning

Scott Dodelson conducts research at the interface between particle physics and cosmology, examining the phenomena of dark energy, dark matter, inflation and cosmological neutrinos. He serves as co-chair of the Science Committee for the Dark Energy Survey, is actively involved in the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration and works with data from the South Pole Telescope.

Media Experience

Carnegie Mellon named NSF planning institute for artificial intelligence in physics  — EurekAlert!
"So much of physics is data rich, whether we are collecting data from the entire night sky, advanced particle detectors like the Large Hadron Collider or modeling individual proteins in a cell," said Scott Dodelson, professor and head of the Department of Physics and principal investigator of the NSF grant. "The partnership between AI and physics will be synergistic. AI will accelerate physics discovery for the future. In turn, what we learn can be fed back into foundational AI research."

Students Log On for First Days of Remote Instruction at CMU  — Carnegie Mellon University News
At the start of Scott Dodelson's Quantum Physics class, he polls his students to find out where they are physically, and what they're experiencing in different parts of the world. The stories are all similar. The streets are quiet. People are trying to stay inside.

Evidence for a new fundamental particle thrills and baffles physicists  — The Washington Post
Physicists are both thrilled and baffled by a new report from a neutrino experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. The MiniBooNE experiment has detected far more neutrinos of a particular type than expected, a finding that is most easily explained by the existence of a new elementary particle: a “sterile” neutrino that’s even stranger and more reclusive than the three known neutrino types.

Discussing dark matter  — Astronomy Magazine
For this dark matter roundtable discussion, The Kavli Foundation brought together cosmologist Scott Dodelson, physicist Risa Wechsler, and astrophysicist George Efstathiou. Each is affiliated with the Dark Energy Survey, an international collaboration focused on shedding light on the dark energy that is responsible for speeding up the expansion of the universe.

Speed limit found for sluggish dark matter  — New Scientist
If particles of dark matter had never formed the clumps they are in today, they would scurry around space at no more than a sluggish 54 metres per second. The finding is one of the few known values for a characteristic of “cold dark matter”, thought to be the most common type of the stuff in the universe.