Dr. Patricia Burchat

Biography

Patricia Burchat is the Gabilan Professor in the Department of Physics at Stanford University. She completed her B.S. in Applied Science & Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1981 and received her Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University in 1986. After her doctorate, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Burchat has received several teaching awards, including the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her research interests focus on fundamental questions in physics, particularly concerning the universe's composition and the laws that govern its constituents. She is currently engaged in exploring the universe at both the smallest and largest scales, utilizing accelerators to probe elementary particles and focusing on astronomical images to investigate cosmological evolution. Burchat is a member of the international collaboration involved in the operation of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which aims to provide a complete census of the universe via the Legacy Survey of Space & Time (LSST). Her involvement encompasses her role as the Deputy Spokesperson and Technical Coordinator for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC), which prepares and optimizes the use of gravitational lensing to study dark matter and dark energy.

Research Interests