Biographical Sketch:
Jacqueline “Jackie” Baeza-Rubio is a 3rd-year graduate student at Yale University. She has been researching neutrinos since 2018 as a High School intern at the University of Texas at Arlington, which later became her undergraduate institution. At UT Arlington, she researched neutrinoless double-beta decay under Dr. Benjamin Jones and Dr. David Nygren, specializing in the construction and improvement of Time Projection Chambers, which included Barium tagging efforts for the NEXT collaboration. At UTA, she was a McNair scholar, the Public Relations director for the outreach program DFW TapTalks, and the undergraduate board representative for the National Society of Hispanic Physicists (NSHP), where she continues to be a sitting board member.
Before coming to Yale, Jackie also participated in an REU program at Duke University’s Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL). At TUNL, she continued researching neutrinoless double-beta decay with the LEGEND collaboration under Dr. Phillip Barbeau and Dr. Matthew Green. During this time, she constructed an accelerator beamline to produce a major radioactive background in LEGEND, and studied its interactions further in germanium detectors similar to the ones employed in LEGEND.
At Yale, she continues in neutrino physics by using optomechanical sensors to conduct sterile neutrino searches under Dr. David Moore. By measuring the momentum recoil of a radioactive nanoparticle, Jackie intends to search for evidence of sterile neutrino mixing. Currently, she is leading the construction of a microfluidic system to release microdroplets containing individual radioactive nanoparticles into a custom linear Paul trap, which will enable transportation of each nanosphere into an optomechanical trap designed for the sterile neutrino search. In her free time, Jackie continues doing outreach with organizations like Pint of Science, Yale’s Pathways to Science, and has organized NSHP x NSBP’s Student Leadership Development Summit.
Education:
Bachelor’s of Science in Physics, Minor in Mathematics, The University of Texas at Arlington, 2023
Honors & Awards:
Dean’s Emerging Scholars Research Award (2024), and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Honorable Mention (2025).
Selected publications:
ORCID ID Google Scholar INSPIRE
Experiments:
SIMPLE, QuIPS
