Molly Ponce de León Watts is a nuclear and particle physicist and a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, where she is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow working at the Wright Laboratory in the group of Professor David Moore.
She leads Yale's experimental work on TFINER, a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts project on deep-space propulsion, and has developed simulations and background analyses for nEXO, a proposed tonne-scale liquid xenon search for neutrinoless double beta decay.
Before physics, Molly studied art history and philosophy and spent several years in New York's contemporary gallery world, later completing a B.A. in physics at Columbia University. Her work starts from the idea that art and science begin as the same impulse.
TFINER is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project on deep-space propulsion, carried out with collaborators at Northwestern University and Draper Laboratory. As the sole graduate researcher on Yale's portion, Molly leads the design and construction of a precision apparatus to measure femtonewton-scale forces from collective alpha decay. With further development, the same force-sensing approach could be pushed toward measuring the tiny recoils of nuclei that emit neutrinos.
nEXO would search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 136Xe, a process that would show the neutrino is its own antiparticle. At the expected rates, a handful of signal events could hide under ordinary radioactivity, so understanding backgrounds is central to the experiment's sensitivity.
Radon-induced backgrounds are expected to dominate nEXO's background budget. In a recent paper, she models how radon progeny drift and implant into the detector cathode, then shows that the pattern of scintillation light below the cathode can reject 41% of the remaining 214Bi background while keeping 95% of signal events, or 57% with a neural-network classifier. An updated optical model also raises the expected efficiency for tagging 214Bi–214Po coincidences from under 1% to about 50%. She has worked directly with scientists at SLAC, LLNL, and PNNL, and chaired the collaboration's DEI seminar committee.
A course at the Yale School of Art, co-developed with Marta Kuzma, professor and former dean of the School of Art, bringing quantum physics together with aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Molly is scheduled to co-teach it in spring 2027. Guest lecturers will include artists and physicists from across Yale and beyond.
One of three Yale graduate students working with Hopkins School leadership and the architecture firm SLAM on scientific and historical murals and design elements for Hopkins School's new Gibbs Center. Molly leads archival research and material selection with Yale's Beinecke and Marx Libraries.
Co-founder of an interdisciplinary seminar at Yale, originally called History and Foundations of Physics, that grew from 18 to over 120 members across physics, astronomy, history, and philosophy, with talks by Lorraine Daston and Adam Frank among others. Molly designed the flyers for its meetings (see below).
Designs hands-on physics programs for New Haven students, including a morning of demonstrations at Edgewood Magnet School and sessions for the Pathways to Science course "Physics of Light." Guest lecturer for the Yale Prison Education Initiative, and workshop leader for Girls Science Investigations and Yale Physics Olympics.
Flyers designed for History and Foundations of Physics, now History and Philosophy of Physics, 2023–2024.