Patricia Burchat

Patricia Burchat (born 1958) is the Gabilan Professor of Physics at Stanford University who researches experimental particle physics and cosmology. She is interested in mapping dark matter in the universe, and understanding the nature of dark energy. She was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005. In 2013 she became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Born in 1958, Burchat was reared in Barry's Bay, Ontario, Canada, and attended Madawaska Valley District High School.

She earned a B.S. in applied science and engineering at the University of Toronto in 1981, and a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in 1986.

Burchat held a post doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1986–1988; she joined the faculty there from 1988–1995. She has been a member of the Stanford Physics faculty since 1995, and served as the chair of the department from 2007–2010.

Since 1986, Burchat has been a member of multiple particle physics experiments: the Mark II experiment at the SLAC Linear Collider, the E791 experiment at Fermilab, and she was a founding member of the BaBar experiment at SLAC, exploring fundamental interactions, especially the weak interaction. Topics she explored in these experiments included the Z-zero neutral carriers of the weak interaction, heavy neutral leptons, semileptonic decay of charm mesons, charm mixing, and CP violation in B meson decays, or differences in the way matter and antimatter evolve in time.

More recently, Burchat has been interested in using telescopes to investigate the cosmological evolution of the Universe. She has joined an international community developing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, preparing to study gravitational bending of light by dark matter and the evolution of dark energy. Her 2008 TED talk, "Shedding light on dark matter", explores these two ingredients making up about 96 percent of the universe.