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Stephanie Wissel named Downsbrough Early Career Professor of Physics

31 January 2022

Stephanie Wissel, assistant professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, has been honored with the Downsbrough Early Career Professorship in Physics. This professorship was established in 2004 by George A. Downsbrough, a physicist whose extensive volunteer work at Penn State included the Armsby Committee, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, and the Eberly College of Science's Grand Destiny Campaign Committee. Downsbrough was named an honorary alumnus of Penn State in 2003.

In her research, Wissel uses cosmic neutrinos to open a new window into the universe, informing both our understanding of astrophysics and of fundamental physics at the highest energy scales. Wissel’s goal is to discover the first neutrinos at high energies, greater than 100 PeV. Wissel uses radio detection techniques, which include the ANITA and PUEO experiments, using NASA’s long-duration balloons; the BEACON concept, using mountaintop radio interferometers; and the radio arrays ARA and RNO-G, buried in ice in Antarctica and Greenland, respectively, that are expected to provide key technological demonstrations for a larger instrument, the radio array in IceCube-Gen2 at the South Pole.

Wissel was honored with an NSF CAREER award, the NSF's most prestigious award in support of early career faculty, in 2018. Her research has been published in scientific journals including Nature, The Astrophysical Journal, the American Journal of Physics, Astroparticle Physics, and Physical Reviews Letters.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Wissel was an assistant professor of physics at the California Polytechnic State University from 2015 to 2019. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 2012 to 2015 and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory from 2010 to 2012. Wissel earned doctoral and master’s degrees in physics at the University of Chicago in 2010 and 2005, respectively. She earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Dallas in 2004.