Alice Cocoros

Dr. Alice Cocoros is a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, focused on applying her expertise in data analysis, modeling, simulation, and physics to space missions such as NASA's latest New Frontiers mission, Dragonfly. She earned a Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University in 2018, writing a thesis in experimental particle physics focused on a search for new particles using data taken with the Compact Muon Solenoid detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. She earned her BA in Astrophysics with Honors from Williams College, with a thesis that focused on developing a new theory to describe the nature of dark matter and its interaction with known particles. 

She serves as the LIDAR Lead for the Mobility team on NASA’s Dragonfly mission, focused on implementing hazard detection for the rotocraft on the surface of Titan. She is the Payload Systems Lead for the Interstellar Probe Study commisioned by NASA's Heliosphysics Science Mission Directorate, which is examining the engineering challenges that would shape a near-term pragmatic mission designed to study our habitable astrosphere by flying through the heliosphere and out to the local interstellar medium. She supervises the Advanced Algorithms Section of the Science and Space Instrumentation Branch in the Space Exploration Sector. Her research interests include applying machine learning techniques to high contrast images of stars to detect exoplanets, as well as developing methods to produce lower size, weight, and power instruments in the far ultraviolet. She is passionate about diversity, inclusion, and mentoring.