Risa regularly gives public lectures and participate in panels, documentaries, and media discussions about cosmology, dark matter, galaxy formation, and the nature of the universe. She is also available for interviews with journalists covering astrophysics, AI + science, and related topics.
Talks and media — Selected public talks, including appearances at TED, the World Science Festival, and the Royal Institution, and media, including PBS, BBC, and NPR. Upcoming — Where to find me at upcoming events. Press — Selected media coverage of our group's research. Speaking inquiries or media requests →Contact For a high-resolution headshot→ See here (credit: Stanford University).
Biographical sketch → Risa Wechsler is a theoretical cosmologist recognized for her work on the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the formation and evolution of galaxies, and the growth of cosmic structure. She is the Humanities and Sciences Professor at Stanford University and Director of both the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and the Center for Decoding the Universe (C4DU). She earned her SB in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her PhD in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. She joined the faculty at Stanford in 2006, and holds appointments in the Stanford Department of Physics and in the Department of Particle Physics & Astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She has played leadership roles in major international survey collaborations, including the Dark Energy Survey, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, and the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. She is also active in research and strategy at the interface of AI and science, and since 2026 is Associate Director of Research in the Physical and Natural Sciences at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and Data Science.
Wechsler is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has served on advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and several foundations, and on the boards of the Aspen Center for Physics and the LSST Discovery Alliance. She is committed to public engagement with science and has shared her work in venues including TED, Teen Vogue, PBS, and the BBC.