The Parno Group

Experimental neutrino physics at Carnegie Mellon University

Welcome!

I am an experimental physicist at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm currently involved in four experiments: KATRIN (an effort in southwestern Germany to measure the absolute mass scale of the neutrino using tritium beta decay), COHERENT (an effort in Tennessee to precisely measure coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, or CEvNS, using several different types of detectors), TRIMS (an effort in Seattle to test the molecular-physics theories that are used in extracting the final KATRIN result), and Project 8 (a collaboration seeking to measure the neutrino mass via a novel method of cyclotron-radiation beta spectroscopy). Between these experiments, my group works on everything from simulation to detector design to operations to data analysis.

Recent Group News

  • May 2026: Congratulations Dr. Gen Li for completing his PhD thesis on the COHERENT heavy-water detector! Dr. Li will go on to work on radiation simulations for medical devices.
  • June 2025: Congratulations Dr. Byron Daniel for completing his PhD thesis on KATRIN and TRIMS! Dr. Daniel will go on to teach high-school science.
  • March 2025: Welcome to Dr. Seung Mok Lee, who has just joined our group as a new postdoc! Dr. Lee earned his PhD in Physics from Seoul National University, working on the COSINE-100 dark-matter experiment.
  • February 2025: Our group has joined the Project 8 collaboration to expand our efforts toward measuring the neutrino mass! Visit the Project 8 site for more details on this exciting experiment.
  • September 2024: I am honored to hold the new Falco-DeBenedetti Career Development Chair in Physics. This article gives some information about the remarkable family legacy that made this possible.
  • July 2024: Congratulations to our postdoc Dr. Kirsten McMichael who is joining the faculty at Washington & Jefferson University in Washington, PA as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics! From August 1 until the end of 2024, Kirsten will spend 50% of her time teaching at W&J, and 50% continuing her research with our group, before transitioning fully to W&J in 2025.