Dr. Karen Andeen

Dr. Karen AndeenMarquette University

Wehr Physics Building, 305

MilwaukeeWI53201United States of America(414) 288-3569karen.andeen@marquette.edu

Associate Professor

Physics

Karen Andeen is a Midwest native, hailing from Arlington Heights, IL.  She received her BA from Augustana College in Rock Island, IL, and her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Dr. Andeen’s research career has focused on particle and astroparticle physics. 

Dr. Andeen’s Ph.D. work was on cosmic ray composition and energy spectrum with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole —at the University of Wisconsin-Madison we built ~1/2 of the ~5200 optical modules used in the detector, so I was also sent to do detector testing and deployment “on the ice” (aka- at the South Pole!!!)

After receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Andeen worked for one year as a postdoc with Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.  She wrote software and tested a new diamond luminosity detector for CMS, called the PLT (Pixel Luminosity Telescope)—yes, you heard correctly: it was made of diamonds.

After one year in New Jersey, Dr. Andeen was offered an opportunity to move to Geneva, Switzerland, where she worked as a postdoc on the AMS-02 experiment, a precision particle physics detector…in space.  (The control room for the experiment was at CERN, which is why she was in Geneva.)  She acted as a liaison between her colleagues at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (in Germany) and the AMS collaboration, while also taking detector shifts and working to analyze the > 60 billion cosmic ray events that have been transmitted to Earth since the project was first launched in May 2011.

Dr. Andeen has now returned to Wisconsin to become a professor at Marquette University where she is teaching physics courses and has rejoined the IceCube Neutrino Observatory to continue her thesis work on cosmic rays and help design new detectors for a proposed upgrade to the experiment.

Dr. Andeen has worked on some of the most extreme projects in the field, involving ice, diamonds, and space!  Having worked or studied on six continents, Dr. Andeen firmly believes in the benefit of multicultural education and study abroad programs.  She speaks some French and German (in addition to English), and is enjoying working in the physics department at Marquette!