NEELIMA SEHGAL
Professor
Physics and Astronomy
neelima.sehgal@stonybrook.edu | (631)-632-8229, ESS 454
Research and Teaching Website
Curriculum Vitae. (Last updated: 2024 Aug 31)

Biography
Neelima Sehgal was born in Manhattan, New York, where she attended the Dalton School. She obtained her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Yale University in 1999, and worked in solar physics (NASA Goddard) and atomic physics (Yale) before joining Rutgers University as a PhD student in 2000 to study string theory. Switching fields to cosmology and the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background in 2003 (when the first WMAP results came out), she obtained her PhD in 2008 in Physics and Astronomy. Neelima Sehgal was a KIPAC postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and SLAC from 2008 to 2011, and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University from 2011 to 2012. She started a faculty position in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Stony Brook University in 2012.

Research Statement
Neelima Sehgal is a theoretical and observational cosmologist. Her research involves understanding the fundamental physics of the Universe, including dark matter, dark energy, the origin of the Universe, and the Universe's particle inventory. Her main tool to do this is to use observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). She is the PI of the CMB-HD experiment, a next-generation CMB observatory designed to map the dark matter in the Universe on small scales using the gravitational lensing of the CMB, and to definitively explore the thermal particle content of the early Universe. Neelima Sehgal also has a theoretical interest in exploring the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity.