Natalia Connolly

Natalia Connolly earned her Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics from University of California, Santa Barbara. As a graduate student, she searched for non-Standard Model physics in rare decays of B-mesons at the electron-positron collider at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She then went on to be a Leon Lederman postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab, where she studied the properties of the top quark as part of the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration, at Fermilab's proton-antiproton Tevatron. In 2003, her interests switched to the rapidly developing field of experimental cosmology. Her current research involves using the Hubble Space Telescope to understand type Ia supernovae as cosmological distance indicators, as well as working on designing a new generation space-based telescope called SNAP that will collect thousands of type Ia supernovae to explore one of the most mysterious recent discoveries in physics -- dark energy. Descriptions of student work done under her supervision may be found here and here.