Hosted by: Enrico Rinaldi

The nucleon axial form factor is a dominant contribution to systematic uncertainties in neutrino oscillation studies. The most commonly used model parametrization of the axial form factor has uncontrolled and underestimated systematic errors. First-principles computations from lattice QCD have the potential to control theory errors by disentangling the effects of nuclear corrections from the nucleon amplitudes. In this talk, I discuss fits to the axial form factor with deuterium bubble chamber data using the model-independent $z$ expansion parameterization. I then present preliminary results for a blinded lattice QCD calculation of the nucleon axial charge $g_A$ with physical light quark masses. This calculation is being done with the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action and 2+1+1 flavors of sea quarks.