Ivy Li
physics phd student @ rice university | astroparticle physics | machine learning | writing
Hi! I am a particle physics PhD student at Rice University with plans to defend in the fall of 2026. My research is in developing custom machine learning models to be used in the direct search for dark matter by particle detectors such as XENONnT. I am advised by Prof. Christopher Tunnell and collaborate with many awesome folks both at Rice and around the world in the xenon TPC community. I also administrate XENONnT’s MongoDB database.
My research projects include
- a physics-informed continuous normalizing flow that learns how to transform event positions inferred from photosensor data into corrected interaction positions inside the detector, while learning the electric field lines from calibration data
- semi-supervised autoencoders to simultaneously compress photosensor data and extract the number of ionization electrons for XENONnT from both spatial data and time-series data
Please see my ORCID for a full list of publications.
Although I mostly work on techy stuff these days, I enjoy writing about non-techy stuff too. In undergrad, I served as a department editor for MIT’s student newspaper The Tech where I covered the arts and culture scene in the greater Boston area. I’ve also been recognized for my poetry, fiction, and humanities essays and write non-technical articles for The Rice Thresher.