Risa Wechsler is Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford University. With her group, Wechsler works on a range of topics in cosmology and astrophysics, with a focus on the formation of cosmological structure in the Universe, its impact on galaxy formation, and its use in determining the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Her group builds and analyzes numerical simulations, develops models of galaxy formation for comparison with large observational datasets, and develops new techniques to learn about the dark side of the Universe from these data. She is actively involved in the ongoing Dark Energy Survey.
She is a Member of the Board on Physics and Astronomy, National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She holds a Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Cruz.
Sharing her expertise with the general public, Wechsler has conveyed her passion for physics in a range of media. In 2016, she appeared on the BBC show Horizon: The Mystery of Dark Energy, and the Science Channel program called Space's Deepest Secrets: Secret History of the Big Bang. In 2012, she spoke on the PBS series Science Bytes: Dark Matters
Wechsler also collaborated with the artist Oxossi Ayofemi on an art exhibit entitled Black Matter, exhibited from July 2018 to January 2020 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The show combined discussions about the elusive nature of the universe's dark matter with notions of presence and absence in African American culture.
