MIT PhD student Jessica Fry pursues dark matter detection

Jessica Fry, a PhD candidate at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science, has traded a career on Broadway for a quest to uncover the universe’s most elusive particle. With a background in performance arts that honed her discipline and collaborative spirit, Fry now applies those same skills to the precise, data‑driven environment of particle physics. Her current research focuses on detecting weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), the leading candidates for dark matter, which has long evaded direct observation.

At the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Fry works with the LUX‑ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration, operating a liquid‑xenon detector deep underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. The experiment seeks to register the faint signals produced when a dark matter particle might collide with a xenon nucleus, a process that is exceedingly rare and requires meticulous background suppression