Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology
Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Risa Wechsler is the Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and an Associate Professor of Physics at Stanford and at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Her expertise is in cosmology, galaxy formation, and cosmological structure formation. Her work uses the largest existing cosmological simulations and the largest galaxy surveys that are being pursued to model the connection between galaxies and their dark matter halos and to learn about the nature of dark energy, dark matter, and the physics of galaxy formation. She was the founding Co-Spokesperson for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, and is a founding member of the Dark Energy Survey and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Dark Energy Science Collaboration. Wechsler is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, as well as a former NASA Hubble Fellow, Enrico Fermi Fellow, and Kavli Fellow. She received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz and did postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan before coming to Stanford in 2006.