Harkay received her B.S. in Physics from St. John’s University in 1982, and her M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1993) in Physics from Purdue University.
From 1984 to 1989 she worked at ANSER, Inc., in Arlington, VA, as a research analyst and project team leader in space systems technology program for the U.S. Air Force.
In 1993, she joined the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne. From 2003 to 2008 she served as the Accelerator Physics Group Leader in ASD, and in 2012 she took on a dual assignment in the Purdue University Department of Physics as a non-faculty Principal Investigator, Associate Staff, a role she currently fills.
Among the professional accomplishments leading to her Fellowship, Harkay was (with Richard Rosenberg, then of ASD, now with the APS X-ray Science Division) the first to characterize the electron cloud distribution in a positron storage ring using retarding field analyzers designed by Rosenberg. Through their many collaborations, RFAs are now a standard electron cloud diagnostic in high-energy storage rings, and play a key role in benchmarking electron cloud simulation codes.
She was co-lead, with Yury Ivanyushenkov (ASD), of the excellent team that successfully commissioned the new superconducting undulator (SCU0) at the Advanced Photon Source, along the way developing a concept for beam-based alignment of the new undulator using thermal sensors, and leading the detailed analysis and measurement of beam-induced heat loads for SCU0.
She has extensively investigated single-bunch intensity limits and beam instability thresholds experimentally in the APS storage ring. She continues to lead the investigation of high-intensity limits at APS, especially in the context of the APS Upgrade.
Harkay is also a scientific lead on research focused on developing photocathodes for ultra-bright electron sources for future-generation light sources, and has collaborated on other cathode R&D, such as pulsed laser heating of thermionic cathodes.
Harkay is author or co-author on 80 papers related to accelerator science at the APS. She has been a member of the American Physical Society since1982 and the Division of Physics of Beams (DPB) since 1990. In 2009, Harkay was named Outstanding Alumna of the Department of Physics, Purdue University. She serves on accelerator advisory committees (AAC) at SLAC and BNL, and in the past, chaired the FNAL ACC and the PhD thesis award committee at the DPB. She is presently advising two students, and has guided research with numerous students since 2001.
The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.
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