On this page you can meet some of the research mentors who will work with interns next summer. All interns will be paired with a junior mentor (UTA graduate student or postdoc), a senior mentor (UTA physics faculty member), and a peer mentor (UTA undergraduate).
Peer Mentor:
Luis Taylor
Luis Taylor grew up in Coppell, Texas and is a 2nd-year undergraduate student. He is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics. He is currently working under Dr. Ben Jones on Project 8 to contribute to building a velocity state selector by configuring an external cavity diode laser and working with the optimization of the evaporative cooling stage of the project. The area of physics that interests him the most is quantum physics, especially the topics of superposition, entanglement, and quantum computing.
Junior Mentor:
Karen Navarro
Karen Navarro is from El Paso, Texas. She began her physics education as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at El Paso and transferred to Texas Tech in her junior year, before coming to the University of Texas at Arlington for graduate school. Karen is working on development of novel ion beam technologies for testing sensors for neutrinoless double beta decay, and complex low level calibrations of the NEXT neutrinoless double beta decay experiment in Canfranc, Spain.
Senior Mentor:
Benjamin J. P. Jones
Benjamin J. P. Jones is an Associate Professor of Physics at UTA and will serve as one of the senior mentors. He received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jones’s research group at UTA focuses on neutrino physics and astrophysics, in particular the nature of neutrino mass, development of barium tagging for neutrinoless double beta decay, and searches for exotic phenomena such as oscillations of sterile neutrinos. He is the Neutrino Oscillations Working Group leader for the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, co-chair of the Speakers and Readers Committee for the NEXT neutrinoless double beta decay collaboration, co-leader of the US Snowmass Process Neutrino Properties Working Group, and an associate director of the UTA Center for High Energy and Nuclear Physics, and from Fall 2020-December 2023 served in multiple Diversity, Equity and Inclusion roles within the UTA Physics Department, College of Science and his various experimental collaborations.
Senior Mentor:
Jonathan Asaadi
Jonathan Asaadi is an Associate Professor of Physics at UTA and will serve as one of senior mentors. Before this I was a postdoctoral researcher with Syracuse University from 2012 – 2015 working with Prof. Mitch Soderberg. I received my PhD in 2012 from Texas A&M University under Prof. David Toback. I graduated from the University of Iowa in 2004 with a B.S in physics. My current research interests focus on understanding the most abundant massive particle in the universe, the neutrino. These neutral particles interact very weakly with ordinary matter, making their detection and study an excitingly challenging research project. I work on accelerator based neutrino detectors like the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino Experiments as well as the future long baseline Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. I contribute to studies using novel detectors for future neutrinoless double beta decay searches and have a passion for instrumentation in High Energy and Nuclear Particle Physics
“Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes.”
Luis Walter Alvarez