Priscilla Cushman

• Member, FRA Board of Directors for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
• Professor of Physics, University of Minnesota

Priscilla Cushman has been a Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota since 1993, where she served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for five years. Her research has explored the nature of matter via three complementary routes: precision measurements of fundamental constants; accelerator searches for new particles; and detection of relic dark matter particles.

She earned her bachelor’s degree cum laude from Harvard in Physics and Philosophy and worked for several years at Aeronautical Research Associates of Princeton before returning to school.  Her PhD (1985) was awarded by Rutgers University for thesis work on hyperons at Fermilab.  She spent her postdoctoral years at CERN working on photon physics with the UA-6 experiment and moved to Yale University as an Assistant Professor, where she received a Texas National Research Laboratory Commission Fellowship to develop novel photodetectors for the new SuperCollider (SSC) to be built in Texas.  While at Yale, she played a major role in bringing the new Brookhaven muon g-2 experiment to fruition, from planning to construction to final analysis.  She brought both of these projects to Minnesota when she accepted a tenured post there.

When the SSC was cancelled, she became involved in the LHC as manager of the CMS hadronic calorimeter readout, developing and commissioning the hybrid photodiodes now in use. When successful completion of the g-2 experiment revealed hints of a new supersymmetric particle, she turned her attention to direct dark matter detection, joining the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment at a crucial time, and helping to install it in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota.  She is now Co-spokesman for the next generation SuperCDMS experiment, and concentrates on particle astrophysics. As the Principal Investigator of an NSF grant to design the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) low background facility and as a founding member of the Low Radioactivity Techniques Workshop, she is deeply invested in promoting ties between national laboratories and the emerging field of underground science in an effort to provide the infrastructure required for the next level of ultra-sensitive experiments in dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay. She is manager of the Soudan Low Background Counting Facility.

She has served on numerous review committees and advisory panels, recently on the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) and the DOE Review of the Non-Accelerator Program at National Laboratories. Currently she is a standing member of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Subatomic Review Committee and national advisor to the fledgling National Instrumentation Task Force.