Brenda L. Dingus

Biosketch

Brenda L. Dingus, Ph.D. is a retired fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and currently a visiting professor at the University of Maryland. Prior to working at LANL she was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and before that she was a professor at the University of Utah. She received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2000. Earlier in her career, she had a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at NASA. Her Ph.D. was from the Physics Department at the University of Maryland, and her B.S. was from Harvey Mudd College. Her honors include the Distinguished Alumni Award of Harvey Mudd College, the Honorary Medal from the Mexican Physical Society, and a LANL Individual Performance Award . She is a fellow of the American Physical Society. She has served on numerous advisory committees for the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and NASA. She was an elected member of the executive committee of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society and of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. She also served as the secretary of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society. In 2024, she was appointed by the governor of New Mexico to be a trustee of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

Research Interests

Dr. Dingus’s research focuses on the observation of the highest energy photons from astrophysical sources. These sources are powerful accelerators of cosmic rays and test our understanding of physics in extreme conditions that cannot be replicated in the lab. She has analyzed data and developed gamma-ray detectors during an era when the number of gamma-ray sources went from a handful to several thousand. While working on NASA’s Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope, she discovered unprecedentedly high energy gamma rays from a gamma-ray burst that were inexplicably delayed in time. She then worked on the development of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Observatory which has since detected many more gamma-ray bursts with similar emission. In order to observe even higher energy emission, larger detectors than can be placed in space are required. Dr. Dingus has been a leader in the development and construction of wide field of view, gamma-ray observatories located at high mountain altitudes. Milagro, was located near Los Alamos National Lab and proved the utility of water Cherenkov observations of extensive air showers to observe gamma rays from astrophysical sources. HAWC, a larger water Cherenkov observatory at even higher altitude in Mexico, has discovered new classes of high energy gamma ray emitters, such as microquasars and pulsar halos, as well as pushing the maximum energy of detected gamma rays even higher. These gamma-ray observations have provided strong constraints on particle acceleration in astrophysical sources as well as on high energy physics phenomena.