McKinsey is a leader in the field of direct searches for dark matter interactions, and serves as Co-Spokesperson of the Large Underground Xenon experiment.
He serves as Director and Principal Investigator of the TESSERACT Project, and is also The Georgia Lee Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
[2] His Ph.D. was awarded by Harvard University in 2002, with a thesis on the magnetic trapping, storage, and detection of ultracold neutrons in superfluid helium.
In particular, his work is on the development, construction, and operation of new detectors using liquefied noble gases, which are useful in looking for physics beyond the Standard Model.
Other interests include the use of liquid xenon for gamma-ray imaging, and the visualization of turbulence in superfluid helium[7]