Berkeley Axion Works (van Bibber group)
Axion dark matter group in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley, led by Karl van Bibber. Designs and builds microwave cavities and resonators for haloscope searches (HAYSTAC, ALPHA, DMRadio), mines Green Bank Telescope data, and develops gamma-ray instrumentation (GALAXIS).
Group website · Based at UC Berkeley
Current members
- Karl van Bibber: PI
- Jonathan Echevers: Postdoc
- Sharada Sahoo: Postdoc
- Shriram Sadashivajois: Postdoc
- Michael Sekatchev: Graduate student
Also listed on the group website (no INSPIRE publications, so no note):
- Ishaan Iyer: Undergraduate (Physics)
- Dylan Miller: Undergraduate (Nuclear)
- Ryan Heunu Yang: Undergraduate (Nuclear)
- Zachary Kronlage: Undergraduate (Physics)
- Josephine Hilliard: Undergraduate (Astrophysics)
- Avery Eylssa Joshua-Tor: Undergraduate (Nuclear)
- Thomas Zhu: Undergraduate
Alumni
- Alexander Leder: Postdoc → Staff scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LEGEND)
- Albert Yuen: PhD student
- Alex Droster: PhD student → KIPAC Fellow, SLAC / Stanford
- Aya Keller: PhD student → Karl van Bibber Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford (Kent Irwin group)
- Heather Jackson: PhD student → Industry
- Lucas Brouwer: PhD student
- Maria Simanovskaia: PhD student → Stanford
- Patricia Schuster: PhD student
- Saad Al Kenany: PhD student
- Samantha Lewis: PhD student → Assistant Professor of Physics, Wellesley College (from July 2023)
- Christian Hagmann: Postdoc (LLNL era)
- Nicholas Rapidis: Undergraduate
- Nolan Kowitt: Undergraduate → MIT
- Aarav Sindhwad: Group member → Yale
- Anna Dawes: Group member → Stanford
- Dajie Sun: Group member → Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Idaho (from August 2026)
- Dillon Goulart: Group member → UC Davis
- Isabella Urdinaran: Group member
- Jaben Root: Group member
- Mackenzie Wooten: Group member
- Mirelys Carcana Barbosa: Group member → Brown
- Ronit Nath: Group member → Start-up
- Sean O’Brien: Group member
Also listed on the group website (no INSPIRE publications, so no note):
- Tory Johansson: Summer student (Oberlin College)
- Bibi Hanselman: Summer student (Amherst College)
- Gavin Ockert: Summer student (Duke University)
- Daksh Rana: Undergraduate (Nuclear)
- Sahej Sethi: Undergraduate (Nuclear)
- Andrei Dones: Undergraduate
- Pablo Castaño: Undergraduate
- Melody Li: Undergraduate
- Roger Yu: Undergraduate
- Clara Hung: Undergraduate
- Alexey Krivega: Undergraduate
- Bill Ostapchuk: Undergraduate (Nuclear)
Roster source: https://axions.berkeley.edu, retrieved 2026-10-16.