Ian Padilla Gay holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Copenhagen at the Niels Bohr Institute (2022). From 2023 to 2025, he was a postdoctoral researcher at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher with N3AS, spending his first year at UC San Diego (2025).

His research is primarily focused on understanding neutrino flavor conversion and heavy-element nucleosynthesis in dense astrophysical environments. In particular, he is interested in implementing neutrino oscillations in state-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations and studying the conditions and outcomes of heavy-element nucleosynthesis, with a special focus on proton-rich nucleosynthesis in the neutrino-driven winds of core-collapse supernovae.