Dr. Andeen has spent her career on IceCube developing the cosmic ray composition analysis, which answers the questions: what are cosmic rays, where are they from, and how do they get here? She will briefly discuss her work, but there will be more about cosmic rays in the coming weeks. Dr. Andeen will also discuss what it means to be a scientist and the varied paths that can lead to a career in science.

Biography

Dr. Karen Andeen is an Assistant Professor in the physics department at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI. She has worked on several experiments, including IceCube, but also AMS-02 (on the International Space Station) and CMS (on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland). Her specialty is cosmic ray physics, and she presently leads a research team focused on cosmic ray composition research with IceCube. Each year Dr. Andeen hires several undergraduate students in her lab to help analyze data and build and test detector upgrade prototypes for IceCube. Dr. Andeen has worked or studied on six continents, speaks a few languages, plays a handful of musical instruments, loves to read and to meet new people, and prefers tea over coffee. She has a family at home, including two young children (age 2 and 5), "and in the winter," she says, "we all like playing in the snow and dancing in the kitchen."

You can email Dr. Andeen at karen.andeen@icecube.wisc.edu

Dr. Andeen's slides are here.