Gabriel Orebi Gann at the Eos neutrino experiment. Credit: Elena Zhukova
Associate Professor Gabriel Orebi Gann has been awarded a 2025 Heising-Simons Faculty Fellowship for her novel work on neutrino detection:
Revolutionizing Neutrino Detection for Next-Generation Discovery
Project Description: The elusive nature of neutrinos makes them both incredibly challenging to observe and unique in their applications, offering a promising laboratory to search for new physics. Improved neutrino detection could enable discovery of neutrinos as their own antiparticles, and observation of CP Violation, in which neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently. These two phenomena could shed light on the preponderance of matter over antimatter in our Universe. The underground physics group at Berkeley leads development of novel technologies to enhance neutrino detection, furthering the reach of next-generation experiments. This project will deploy a prototype at an intense neutrino source, offering the world’s first detection of low-energy neutrinos using our novel technology. Direct demonstration of the dramatic improvements of this technology would pave the way for a rich program of world-leading physics, demonstrating for the first time the ability to differentiate neutrino interactions from noise at the level required.
Gabriel attended the University of Cambridge in the UK from 2000 to 2004, where she received her BA and MSci in Natural Sciences. She went on to the University of Oxford, and was awarded her DPhil in Particle and Nuclear Physics in 2008. Her post-doctoral research was performed at the University of Pennsylvania, in Professor Klein's research group, working on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and its successor, the SNO+ experiment. Gabriel joined the U.C. Berkeley faculty in 2012, where she has built a group that pursues both cutting-edge particle physics and detector development for next-generation discovery.
The Heising-Simons Faculty Fellows Program catalyzes scientific discovery by investing in high-risk, high-reward research directions. The Program supports exceptional faculty working on topics in a diverse set of fields, including astronomy, physics, geology and geophysics, materials sciences (in both physics and engineering), and physical and materials chemistry. Program awards focus on creative and novel approaches that promise to lead to important scientific breakthroughs contributing to a greater understanding of the universe and its components, from the molecular and atomic to the geological and planetary scales, among other areas. Awards also fund the development of new tools, techniques and measurements that help probe these physical phenomena in new ways.