Alexandra Klipfel

Alexandra Klipfel is a fourth year undergraduate physics major at Caltech. She is a researcher with the Kirschvink Biomagnetics Group at Caltech, the Daniels Nonlinear Lab at North Carolina State University, and the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at Caltech.

She worked as a researcher and Caltech SURF Fellow with the Ingersoll Group in Caltech's Geological and Planetary Sciences Division from March 2019-March 2021. Within this group, she developed numerical simulations of cyclones at the poles of Jupiter to model observations made by the Juno spacecraft and answer fundamental questions about geophysical fluid dynamics and the atmospheres of gas giants.

She then joined the Kirschvink lab as a SURF fellow in the Summer of 2020 and continues to apply physics to cutting edge questions in biophysics and biomedicine. She is currently developing a numerical model of RF transduction by biogenic magnetite nanoparticles and applying this model to questions related to animal navigation, magnetic hyperthermia treatments, and RF-induced traumatic brain injury.

Alexandra was awarded a SURF fellowship to join the Daniels Nonlinear Lab at NC State University in Raleigh during the summer of 2021, where she studied the behavior of granular materials in low effective gravities. This project investigated how granular materials deform and flow under applied forces and has many applications, ranging from the geophysics of avalanches to the mechanics of landing spacecraft on asteroids and small moons.

Alexandra is currently working on an experimental senior thesis project at Caltech's Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. She is constructing and characterizing the B₀ magnet system for the nEDM@SNS experiment, a large collaboration aimed at high-precision measurements of the neutron's electric dipole moment in search of CP violation and beyond standard model physics.