Mehr Un Nisa

Particle Astrophysicist. Assistant Professor at MSU.
My work spans gamma-ray and neutrino astronomy, and astrophysical searches for the particle nature of dark matter. I am affiliated with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-ray Experiment.

Research

My main focus these days are multimessenger searches for sources of astrophysical neutrinos with IceCube, and, constraining beyond-the-standard-model Physics with HAWC.

Neutrino Astronomy

I am working with IceCube collaborators on tools to enhance our sensitivity to point- and extended-source searches, and cross-correlating very-high-energy gamma-ray data with neutrinos. My current projects include the search for neutrino emission from clusters of galaxies, and studying the signatures of dark matter annihilation in the Sun. I am also assisting with various tasks for improving the infrastructure for sending neutrino alerts to the community in realtime.

Probing Anomalous Fluxes of Gamma rays and Cosmic rays

Precision measurements of cosmic rays and the gamma-ray sky over the last decade have revealed certain astrophysical "anomalies", such as the increasing positron fraction, the constant antiproton-to-proton ratio, and a bright, steady emission of gamma rays from the Sun at multi-GeV energies. I have contributed to analyses of HAWC data, investigating the aforementioned puzzles in the TeV range and exploring their connections to indirect searches for dark matter.

List of Publications

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Background

I finished my Ph.D at the University of Rochester in 2018, working as a member of the HAWC Collaboration. I joined the particle astrophysics group at the Michigan State University as a postdoc in 2019. In 2023, I joined the faculty in the same department as an assistant professor. I am originally from Islamabad, Pakistan🏏

Get in touch

If you're a physicist, you would know why or how to reach me. If you're a student, an aspiring physicist or a generally curious soul -- especially a woman or under-represented minority in Physics -- send me an email and I would be happy to chat about navigating both particles and people in the world of research.