Dr. Erica Caden

Dr. Erica Caden is an advocate for inclusion in science. She has been a research scientist at SNOLAB, Canada’s Deep Underground Research Facility since 2016. Prior to that she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario from 2013-2016. Dr. Caden completed her PhD at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2013, working on a neutrino oscillation experiment located at a nuclear reactor complex in rural France. Her dissertation work improved on the ability to resolve the direction of a low-energy neutrino source using a small scintillator detector. This work has applications to nuclear non-proliferation and is still being used by current neutrino experiments. Dr. Caden currently works on two experiments, SNO+ and nEXO, searching for a rare nuclear reaction called “Neutrino-less Double Beta Decay.” Observing this reaction will give physicists a wealth of information about the neutrino’s mass, the neutrino’s quantum nature, and hints towards why we are in a matter-dominated universe.

While in graduate school, Dr. Caden founded the Physics Graduate Student Association at Drexel University. This organization created community in the physics department, and gave students a bi-weekly forum to gather, discuss research questions, and support each other. In 2019, Dr. Caden won Sudbury’s “40 Under Forty” award for her science communication and outreach work. In 2020, she won a similar award from Drexel University’s Alumni Association. Currently, Dr. Caden is on the organizing board of the Sudbury Regional Science Fair, chairs the SNOLAB sessions of TRISEP: a graduate summer school on elementary particle physics, and serves on SNOLAB’s EDI Committee.