Biography
Benjamin Safdi received his undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a Master of Advanced Study from Cambridge University, as a Churchill Scholar, and his PhD from Princeton University in 2014. He was then a Pappalardo Fellow in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2017, when he started as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Safdi moved to LBNL in 2020 and then to UC Berkeley, where he is currently an assistant professor, in 2021. He received the Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2018 and the IUPAP C11 Young Scientist Prize in Particles and Fields in 2020.
Research interests
Dr. Safdi’s research investigates the microscopic nature of dark matter, which is currently unknown. He has helped establish pathways towards potentially discovering some of the most well-motivated dark matter candidates, such as axion dark matter, with novel laboratory experiments and astrophysical probes. In addition, he has developed data-analysis techniques that have helped better understand how to search for signatures of dark matter in complicated astrophysical datasets. Dr. Safdi also performs calculations and simulations within the context of dark matter models such as axion models, making use of high-performance computing resources, that inform these searches. Dr. Safdi is a founding member of the ABRACADABRA axion dark matter experiment, and his research makes use of astrophysical data from ground- and space-based telescopes such as the Fermi gamma-ray telescope, the XMM-Newton, Chandra, and NuSTAR X-ray telescopes, and the Green Bank radio telescope.
Selected publications
Full list of publications can be found here