Zoya Vallari

Zoya Vallari is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the Ohio State University specializing in experimental particle physics with focus on neutrino phenomena. She joined the faculty on January 1, 2025, and works on flagship US experiments including NOvA and DUNE.

• Ph.D. Physics, Stony Brook University, 2018
• M.S. Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, 2012
• B.S. Physics (Hons.), St. Stephen's College Delhi, 2010

Dr. Vallari's research centers on neutrino physics, particularly long-baseline neutrino oscillations which provide insights into physics beyond the Standard Model. Her work addresses fundamental questions including neutrino mass ordering and leptonic CP violation, with implications for understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. She combines data from NOvA and T2K experiments to measure neutrino mixing parameters and break degeneracies between mass ordering and CP violation measurements.

Her research program spans four interconnected areas: neutrino oscillations, neutrino-nucleus interactions, detector development, and high performance computing. She measures neutral current neutrino interactions producing single neutral pions, develops modular liquid argon detector technologies for DUNE, and creates GPU-optimized simulation tools like the larnd-sim package which achieves three orders of magnitude speed-up compared to CPU implementations.

• 2024 Leona Woods Lecturership Award for contributions to neutrino oscillation experimental physics

Dr. Vallari actively contributes to the DUNE collaboration's detector development, particularly testing the 2x2 grid modular liquid argon detector prototype at Fermilab's NuMi beam facility. Her computational work focuses on preparing analysis frameworks for DUNE's unprecedented data volumes using next-generation GPU-powered supercomputers. She collaborates with international teams across multiple institutions to advance neutrino physics capabilities.

Her laboratory work involves characterizing detector performance in neutrino beams and developing analysis techniques for neutrino interaction data. She participates in joint analyses between major neutrino experiments to enhance measurement precision and is involved in testing novel pixel charge readout technologies that provide unambiguous 3D particle tracking in liquid argon time projection chambers.