Dr. Lina Necib

Biography

Lina Necib is an assistant professor at the MIT Kavli Institute with a focus on astroparticle physics, particularly interested in understanding the origin of Dark Matter. She employs a combination of simulations and observational data to correlate the dynamics of Dark Matter with stars in the Milky Way, inferring properties of Dark Matter from these correlations. Necib has investigated the local dynamic structures of the Solar neighborhood utilizing data from the Gaia mission and has contributed to building a catalog of local accreted stars using machine learning techniques. She discovered a new stellar stream, named Nyx after the Greek Goddess of Night, using spectroscopy to identify its properties. Her research interests include using Gaia in conjunction with other spectroscopic surveys to understand the Dark Matter profile in the local solar neighborhood, as well as in the center of the Galaxy and dwarf galaxies. With a background in particle physics, she relates empirical results about Dark Matter to current direct and indirect detection experiments.

Research Interests

Experience