After growing up in Toronto, Professor Rajagopal did his undergraduate work at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He obtained his doctorate at Princeton University in 1993 and spent three years at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. He then spent one year at Caltech before coming to MIT in 1997. He became the Associate Head of the Department of Physics in 2009, served as the Chair of the MIT faculty from 2015 to 2017 and as MIT’s Dean for Digital Learning from 2017 to 2021.

Professor Rajagopal has also described the properties of the superfluid, color superconducting, quark matter that may lie at the centers of neutron stars, providing a clear understanding of the properties of matter at extraordinarily high densities. His work shows that cold quark matter at the highest densities is the QCD analogue of a superconductor but that if you could look at it using ordinary light it would look like a transparent insulator.

Peter Dourmashkin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics at MIT. His research interests are in Mathematical Physics, Lie Group and Algebra Representation Theory. He has been part of the development, implementation, and teaching team for Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL). He has developed OCW Scholar Courses, the physics curriculum for a new university, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), and is currently working on online learning through MITx and edX.

Professor Perez is interested in using cosmic particles to look for beyond the Standard Model physics, in particular evidence of dark matter interactions. Her work focuses on opening sensitivity to unexplored cosmic signatures, with impact at the intersection of particle physics, astrophysics, and advanced instrumental techniques.

The origin of dark matter is a driving question of contemporary physics. Dark matter particle processes could imprint characteristic signals in cosmic-ray and multi-wavelength observations. Professor Perez’s group leads the silicon detector program for the GAPS experiment, an Antarctic balloon mission that aims to detect low-energy antinuclei as evidence of dark matter annihilation or decay. As the first experiment optimized specifically for low-energy antideuterons, which have been discussed for over a decade as an essentially background-free signature of dark matter, GAPS is poised to make a major contribution to the field. In addition, her group uses the NuSTAR telescope array to probe astrophysical X-ray signatures of both light dark matter and the stellar remnant backgrounds to these exotic particle physics searches. Her group’s work also includes developing the X-ray optics for the International Axion Observatory (IAXO), a next-generation solar axion helioscope.

Saif Rayyan was Assistant Director of Academic Programs at the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL). Saif was born in Amman, Jordan. He holds a BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Jordan and a PhD in Physics from Virginia Tech. He first joined MIT in 2009 as a postdoctoral associate in physics education research, with a focus on implementing and researching pedagogical innovations using digital tools and platforms. Following his postdoctoral work, Saif transitioned into the role of a Digital Learning Scientist in the physics department and MIT Open Learning.

Saif held positions of lecturer in the physics department, a member of the instructional team running the TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) classroom. Saif was awarded the MIT Physics Department Buechner Faculty Teaching prize in 2015 and was also the co-recipient of the inaugural MITx Prize for Teaching and Learning with MOOCs for his work on the 8.01x series on Classical Mechanics.

Michelle Tomasik is a Lecturer in the Department of Physics at MIT where she currently works on developing online classes and assists with physics education research and teaching introductory physics. She received her Ph.D. in physics from MIT working on photovoltaics and density functional theory.

Analia Barrantes is a Physics Lecturer at the Experimental Study Group at MIT and is working in the development of pedagogical content for the freshmen physics courses on edX. Analia holds a master’s in physics from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from MIT.

George Stephans (PhD U Pennsylvania) is a Senior Research Scientist in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science and a Senior Lecturer in the Physics Department at MIT. His research work involves collisions of very high energy atomic nuclei. The goal of these studies is to understand the behavior of systems of sub-atomic constituents (quarks and gluons) at extremely high temperatures and densities. His most recent experiments use the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He has decades of experience teaching physics at MIT, including many different versions of 8.02.