Phiala Shanahan, Ph.D.

Shanahan is a professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the research lead for physics theory at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. She grew up in Adelaide, Australia, and obtained her B.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide in 2012 and 2015, respectively. She joined the MIT faculty in 2018 after a postdoctoral position at MIT and a tenure-track faculty position at the College of William & Mary and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory. Shanahan is best known for her work on the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei and her innovative use of machine learning techniques in lattice quantum field theory calculations.