Stephanie Wissel is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Penn State University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in astro-particle physics. From Chicago she went to Princeton University where she had a postdoctoral appointment at the Princeton University Plasma Lab; there she conducted plasma physics and teaching innovation research. After leaving Princeton she completed a second postdoctoral appointment at UCLA, where she worked on the ANITA project to detect neutrinos at the Southpole. Prof Wissel received the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for new faculty, the Faculty Early Career Development Program, or CAREER, Award.
The Wissel group works towards developing the next-generation of in-ice radio instruments through the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) experiment at the South Pole and the Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland (RNO-G). Radio experiments are required for neutrino searches at the highest energies, where the flux is low. at those energies, sources might show signs of cutoffs or spectral breaks and neutrinos from cosmic rays are expected. Both experiments serve as pathfinders for the radio instrument for IceCube Gen2. Wissel laid the groundwork for experiments in Greenland through field campaigns. ARA has the largest exposure the highest energies and analysis is underway. The first RNO-G stations will be deployed in Greenland in 2020.