Prize Recipient

Andrew Geraci
Northwestern University

"For developing new precision measurement techniques to search for weakly coupled interactions of mesoscopic range and demonstrating the precision sensing capability of optically levitated nanoparticles."

Andrew Geraci completed his undergraduate studies in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1998. In 2007 he completed a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford under thesis advisor Aharon Kapitulnik, and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NIST in Boulder, CO where he was a National Research Council postdoctoral Research Associate. In 2011 Geraci started a research group as an assistant professor at the University of Nevada and moved to Northwestern University in 2018, where he is currently associate professor of physics and a member of the Center for Fundamental Physics and the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics. His research interests include tabletop tests for physics beyond the Standard Model, dark matter, experimental gravitation, gravitational wave detection, ultrasensitive force detection, hybrid quantum systems, and quantum optomechanics. Prior accomplishments include work at Stanford achieving the most stringent limits on corrections to the gravitational inverse square law at the 10 micron length scale, in an experiment using highly-sensitive cryogenic micro-resonators. The Geraci research group at Northwestern is developing ultra-sensitive force sensing techniques for experimental gravitational physics, involving laser-cooled and trapped nanoparticles. Geraci also leads ARIADNE, an international collaboration using NMR-based techniques to search for the QCD axion. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.