Rate My Professor Brianna Mount

Dr. Brianna Mount is an Associate Professor of Physics in the School of Natural Sciences at Black Hills State University, where her academic career began in 2011. Born and raised in Idaho, she earned B.S. degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Idaho and a Ph.D. in Physics from Florida State University in 2010. Her dissertation, "High Precision Atomic Mass Spectrometry with Applications to Neutrino Physics," employed the Florida State University cryogenic Penning trap mass spectrometer. As Lab Director of the BHSU Underground Campus (BHUC)—a cleanroom facility on the 4850-foot level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)—Mount manages high purity germanium (HPGe) detectors for low-background counting. She also serves as Principal Investigator of the BHSU Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) laboratory.

Mount's research interests center on underground physics, rare event searches in laboratories worldwide, quantification of low radioactive elements in materials for underground experiments, data analysis simulations, and interdisciplinary collaborations with biologists and chemists. She is a member of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), XLZD, and Ge-STAR collaborations, contributing to the LZ experiment recognized as the world's leading weak interactive massive particle (WIMP) detector. In 2024, she secured a $997,522 U.S. Department of Energy EPSCoR grant to enhance BHSU's LZ data analysis and low-background screening for XLZD, partnering with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; additional DOE funding supports RENEW workforce development and germanium-based research. Mount directs the ten-week BHSU Underground Science Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program and co-organizes a DOE RENEW-funded summer initiative with the University of Michigan. She held national leadership roles on the American Physical Society Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) National Organizing Committee chair lines from 2020 to 2024 and the NSF Physics REU Leadership Group from 2019 to 2022. Key publications include "Counting facilities at the Black Hills Underground Campus" (AIP Conference Proceedings 2908, 020003, 2023), "Black Hills State University Underground Campus" (Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A, 2017), and LZ contributions such as "Calibrations and backgrounds for dark matter direct detection" (2022). Her emphasis on undergraduate research fosters skills development, retention, intellectual curiosity, and increased Native American participation in SURF science.