Mark Chen

Mark Chen is a particle astrophysicist and a member of CIFAR’s Cosmology and Gravity program. Mark is a co-Principal Investigator for the Sudbury Neutrino Investigator (SNO), an experiment located 2km underground in INCO’s Creighton Mine.

There, Mark and his colleagues solved the 30-year-old “solar neutrino problem” by discovering that neutrinos, one of the basic subatomic particles that are the building blocks of the universe, change “flavour” en route from the core of the sun where they are produced to where they are detected. The discovery by SNO rated in the top two scientific breakthroughs named by both Discover and Science magazines in 2002. As a member of the Canadian SNO team, Mark was a recipient of the NSERC John C. Polanyi Award in 2006. He is now the director of the SNO+Project, an experiment developed as a follow-up to SNO, and is developing SNOLAB. Mark is working on detecting the mysterious dark matter particles that are believed to be a large component of the universe. Together with his colleagues, Mark is helping to make Canada a world leader in the quest for dark matter.