Physics & Astronomy Public Talk – Spring 2020 – Roberts

Speaker: Amy Roberts (UC Denver)

Title: Science needs everyone: working to make a dark-matter data set accessible

Abstract: Doing science in the dark matter field currently requires students to learn significant amounts of “hidden curriculum” to successfully contribute.  This represents wasted time for all dark matter experiments and is particularly harmful to students and early-career researchers who are not comfortable demanding time from senior scientists or who have limited access to programming experts.

This talk will focus on what the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search is doing to create a web-accessible  analysis environment based on JupyterHub.  This effort has significantly increased undergraduate participation in CDMS and I’ll discuss successes of the effort and where it falls short.  I’ll also discuss resources that are available to help researchers deploy similar environments.

Speaker Biography: Amy Roberts joined CU Denver as  an Assistant Professor of Physics in 2017.  She grew up splitting her time between airplane hangars, the Michigan forest, and watching Robocop with her brother.  She spent her early professional life as an experimental nuclear physicist, improving neutron-time-of-flight detectors for beam-based studies of the 76Ge nucleus as a graduate student and then validating ultra-cold neutron simulations at Los Alamos National Lab.  She joined the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search in 2014 and has since been involved in the data acquisition, data quality, and analysis framework for the upcoming SNOLAB installation.  Her work focuses on understanding detector response to energy deposition and on enabling reproducible and accessible research.

Homepage: https://clas.ucdenver.edu/physics/amy-roberts-phd