Prize Recipient

Katelin Schutz grew up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. As an undergraduate at MIT, she did research with Max Tegmark, Alan Guth, David Kaiser, and Tracy Slatyer. After graduating in 2014, Katelin moved to UC Berkeley for her PhD with the support of the Hertz Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Her thesis, titled "Searching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe" was supervised by Hitoshi Murayama and was completed in 2019. In the final year of her PhD in the Berkeley Center for theoretical Physics, Schutz received the Brantley-Tuttle Tahoe Fellowship. She was also named a 2019 Rising Star in physics by the Stanford and MIT Departments of Physics. Schutz now holds a five-year appointment as a Pappalardo fellow in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. Her ongoing research focuses on using astrophysics and cosmology to understand the building blocks of our Universe, with an emphasis on the nature of dark matter.