As a joint postdoctoral fellow at UIUC and Argonne National Laboratory, Pankaj works within the QuantISED collaboration. He completed his PhD at UC Santa Cruz, specializing in dark matter phenomenology and lepton flavor violation in the SMEFT framework. Pankaj's research focuses on investigating the production mechanisms and detection signatures of dark matter. He is proficient in advanced detection methods utilizing solid crystals, electrons, and more recently magnons, with a broader interest in quantum information and sensing, ultralight axions, and spin-dependent interactions.

Olivia is a Physics Ph.D. student with research interests at the intersection of cosmology and particle physics. Her current focus is using pulsar timing arrays to search for gravitational waves from novel early universe cosmologies and dark matter candidates. Before coming to UIUC, she was an undergraduate at the University of Central Florida and Fulbright Germany grantee at the University of Münster Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Connor is interested in the phenomenology of dark matter direct detection experiments, particularly focusing on techniques that hunt for sub-GeV dark matter. He has contributed to code packages (DarkELF, EXCEED-DM) that predict the sensitivity of phonon-based and electron-based experiments, with the goal of understanding the dark matter models that current experiments can probe. More broadly, he is interested in applying techniques from condensed matter physics to explore the effectiveness of other collective excitations in direct detection experiments. Before coming to UIUC, Connor was an undergrad at UC San Diego.