Group

Five people standing and smiling in front of a laboratory cryostat rack with a sign reading CMB.

In the lab. Front row, left to right: Toby Satterthwaite, Zeeshan Ahmed, Shawn Henderson. Back row, left to right: Rui Shi and Cheng Zhang. (Credit: KIPAC)

Two people seated in front of a large open cryostat packed with foil-wrapped optics tubes and wiring.

Toby Satterthwaite and Zeeshan Ahmed at the completed Advanced Simons Observatory LAT camera.

Graduate students

  • Brianna Cantrall · Stanford · 2024–present Cosmic inflation search with BICEP Array; characterization of Galactic foregrounds.
  • Thomas Satterthwaite · Stanford · 2023–present CMB lensing reconstruction with the Simons Observatory; commissioning of the SO camera readout system.

Postdoctoral researchers and fellows

  • Jia ‘Frank’ Qu · Stanford · 2023–present · Einstein Fellow, 2026–present CMB lensing reconstruction with the Simons Observatory.
  • Carlos Sierra · KIPAC Fellow, Stanford · 2024–present Millimeter-wave line intensity mapping simulations and experiment design.
  • Tristan Pinsonneault-Marotte · Stanford · 2023–present Simons Observatory readout subsystem; CMB and large-scale structure cross-correlations.
  • Rui ‘Ray’ Shi · Stanford · 2025–present BICEP Array Galactic foreground studies; time-division readout electronics.

Research scientists

  • Cheng Zhang · Stanford · 2025–present Design, modeling and fabrication of superconducting and qubit-based sensors.
  • Dominic Beck · Stanford · 2025–present AI techniques for CMB data quality and data processing pipeline speedup.

Staff scientists

  • Emmanuel Schaan · SLAC · 2022–present Simons Observatory large-scale structure studies; Rubin.
  • Shawn Henderson · SLAC · 2017–present CMB detector readout systems; Simons Observatory, BICEP.

Alumni

  • Cyndia Yu · PhD, 2023 · now at Rigetti Computing Large-Scale Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
  • Federico Bianchini · postdoc, 2020–2024 · now at Woven by Toyota CMB inflation foreground cleaning.
  • David Goldfinger · postdoc, 2022–2023 · now at MIT Lincoln Laboratory CMB-S4 detector readout system development.
  • Ari Cukierman · postdoc, 2018–2022 · now a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech Ultralight axion searches with CMB polarization; the BICEP/Keck microwave multiplexing demonstrator.
  • Ed Young · postdoc, 2018–2021 · now Head of Research at Charm Industrial X-ray calorimetry with microwave multiplexing.
  • Sarah Kernasovskiy · postdoc, 2016–2018 Development of SMuRF.
  • Max Silva-Feaver · PhD, UC San Diego · 2016–2023 · now Mossman Fellow at Yale Microwave multiplexing for the Simons Observatory.
  • Stephen Kuenstner · PhD, Stanford · 2016–2018 Microwave multiplexing development.

Former members now elsewhere

  • W. L. Kimmy Wu Assistant Professor, California Institute of Technology.
  • Kirit Karkare Assistant Professor, Boston University.
  • Josef Frisch Senior engineer, Google.

Joining the group

Concrete directions with room in them right now:

  • microwave multiplexed readout systematics and how they propagate into CMB lensing
  • Galactic foreground characterization for inflation searches
  • single-photon detectors for quantum networking
  • superconducting device fabrication at the Detector Microfabrication Facility

Undergraduates. Through the Stanford undergraduate research programs, or through DOE SULI.

Graduate students. If you have been admitted to Stanford, write to me about a rotation project.

Postdocs. Write to me directly at zeesh@slac.stanford.edu.