Karsten Heeger is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Director of Wright Laboratory at Yale University. He is also co-director of the Yale Center for the Invisible Universe (YCIU). His research focuses on the study of neutrino oscillations, neutrino mass, and dark matter.
Heeger was involved in the first observation of solar neutrino flavor transformation with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) and the resolution of the solar neutrino problem. He contributed to the first observation of reactor antineutrino oscillation with KamLAND, and played a leading role in the first measurement of the neutrino mixing angle theta13 with Daya Bay. Heeger was PI and co-spokesperson of PROSPECT, a precision measurement of reactor antineutrinos and search for sterile neutrinos at very short baselines. He is probing the nature of neutrinos with the CUORE double beta decay experiment and performing R&D with Project 8 towards a novel experiment to measure neutrino mass. From 2021-2025, he served as international co-spokesperson of CUPID, the CUORE Upgrade with Particle Identification.
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.
Heeger has served on national and international committees, including as Deputy Chair of the 2023 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), 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 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 US Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). He served as co-chair of the APS DPF Coordinating Panel of Advanced Detectors (CPAD).
Prof. Heeger was Associate Editor for the European Physical Journal C and Journal of Physics G and is a reviewer for Physics Review, NIM, Physics Letters, and others.
