Northwestern University, 2010-2016

Cheryl's PhD Thesis

By studying what happens when antineutrinos bombard heavy nuclei, I helped the community to understand nuclear structure, and how the universe might treat matter and antimatter differently.

As a PhD student, I worked on the MINERvA experiment at Fermilab, supervised by Prof. Heidi Schellman at Northwestern University (now at Oregon State). I defended my thesis, Measurement of the Antineutrino Double-Differential Charged-Current Quasi-Elastic Scattering Cross Section at MINERvA on March 9th, 2016, and officially graduated in June 2016, the day before presenting my results at the Fermilab Wine and Cheese Seminar. In 2017, I was delighted to receive the Springer Thesis Prize and my thesis was published in book form. In 2018, we published the analysis as C.E. Patrick et al (MINERvA collaboration), Phys. Rev. D 97, 052002.

Click here to find out more about my work on MINERvA.