About

I am an observational cosmologist and experimental physicist. My work spans the whole measurement chain, from superconducting devices fabricated on silicon wafers, through the cryogenic instruments that hold them and the electronics that read them out, to the cosmological inference drawn from the resulting maps.

I received my PhD in particle astrophysics from Caltech in 2012, working on direct detection of WIMP dark matter with the CDMS-II experiment. I then shifted my effort to searching for inflation with the cosmic microwave background. I was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford through 2015 before being appointed a Wolfgang Panofsky Fellow at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2017 I received a Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career Award to develop superconducting multiplexing techniques for next-generation CMB cameras. I was appointed a Lead Scientist at SLAC in 2020 and Associate Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford and SLAC in 2023.

A person standing on a snow-dusted high-altitude plateau with volcanic peaks behind.

At the Simons Observatory site in the Parque Astronómico de Atacama.

Current roles

  • Head, CMB Department, Fundamental Physics Directorate, SLAC 2019–present
  • Associate Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, KIPAC, SLAC and Stanford 2023–present
  • DOE Principal Investigator, BICEP Array Upgrade Project 2025–present
  • SLAC Principal Investigator and Readout L2 manager, SPT-3G+ 2025–present
  • Co-Investigator, Advanced Simons Observatory (NSF), leading the SLAC scope 2023–present
  • Photon Sensors project lead, Sensors for Entanglement thrust, Q-NEXT 2025–2030
  • Principal Investigator and user, SLAC Detector Microfabrication Facility; member of its process review committee 2026–present
  • Member, Program Committee, Applied Superconductivity Conference 2026

From 2022 to 2025 I directed the project that designed and built SLAC’s Detector Microfabrication Facility. The facility is now in operations, and I work in it as a principal investigator, fabricating devices for cosmology and quantum sensing.

From 2019 until the project’s cancellation in 2025, I was the level-2 science lead for detector readout on CMB-S4.

Education

  • PhD, Particle Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology. A Dark-Matter Search Using The Final CDMS II Dataset And A Novel Detector Of Surface Radiocontamination, advisor Sunil Golwala 2012
  • MS, Physics, California Institute of Technology 2008
  • BS, Aerospace Engineering, University of Southern California 2005

Contact

A modern three-story building with large windows, surrounded by redwoods and lawn at dusk.

The Kavli Building at SLAC, which houses KIPAC. (Credit: SLAC Communications)

2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025

zeesh@slac.stanford.edu

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