Barkotel Zemenu

Biography

I am a rising senior at Yale University majoring in Physics (Intensive) and pursuing a Certificate in Modern Hebrew. An international student from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, my research experience in high energy physics, quantum gravity and astrophysics has taken me to four continents and several US states. Since my first year, I have been part of the nEXO collaboration searching for neutrinoless double beta decay, a hypothetical nuclear process pointing to new physics beyond the Standard Model. My key task involves characterizing the purity of candidate detector materials to discriminate the decay signal against pesky background sources. I have presented my research at several international conferences including APS April 2023 (Top Oral Presenter), Society of Physics Congress 2022 (Finalist Presenter) and APS Division of Nuclear Physics 2022 (CEU Awardee). While my plan is to pursue graduate study in experimental neutrino physics, I dipped my feet into theoretical physics research last summer as an MCQST Bachelor Scholar in Munich, Germany. Focusing on the group field theory formalism of quantum gravity, I compiled a white paper on the entanglement entropy of glued tetrahedrons quantized as spin networks. This summer, I will be joining an observational astrophysics group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Tel Aviv, Israel, as a Kupcinet-Getz Summer Student while also taking part in PSI START, Perimeter Institute's online theoretical physics school. At Yale, I am the current co-president and former outreach co-chair of Society of Physics Students, undergraduate teaching assistant for six physics courses and an unorthodox enrollee in a copious number of foreign language classes, including Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and Ancient Greek.