Laura Baudis

Biosketch

Laura Baudis is a professor of physics at the University of Zurich and chair of its Department of Physics. An experimental astroparticle physicist, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg (1999) and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. In 2004 she joined the University of Florida as an assistant professor, receiving an NSF Career award. In 2006 Baudis became Lichtenberg Professor for Astroparticle Physics at RWTH Aachen University, and she moved to Zurich in 2007 as full professor of experimental physics. Baudis is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, and a former member of the CERN Science Policy Committee. She served as editor-in-chief of The European Physical Journal C and chaired the APPEC Scientific Advisory Committee. Her honours include an ERC Advanced Grant (2017, Xenoscope), a Visiting Miller Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley (2020), and the Charpak–Ritz Prize of the French and Swiss Physical Societies (2022).

Research Interests

Laura Baudis investigates the fundamental nature of dark matter and neutrinos through rare-event searches in ultra-low-background experiments. Her goals are to detect dark matter particles via their exceedingly rare interactions in terrestrial detectors, and to observe neutrinoless double-beta decay, a discovery that would establish the Majorana nature of neutrinos and demonstrate lepton-number violation. Since her days as a PhD student in Heidelberg, Baudis has developed and operated detectors for both frontiers. She is a co-founder of the XENON program, which uses large liquid xenon detectors to seek dark matter interactions, and of the LEGEND experiment, which searches for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of 76-Ge. She leads the DARWIN collaboration, which carries out R&D toward an 80-tonne liquid xenon observatory for dark matter and neutrino physics. Baudis is also passionate about new sensor technologies, background suppression techniques and radioassay methods, and she carries out measurements of the scintillation and ionization response of liquid xenon as a radiation detection medium.