Northern Illinois University
Department of Physics
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

I am a particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. I’ve been part of the ATLAS Collaboration since 2009, splitting my time between data analysis and detector R&D. 

I studied physics and completed an MSc in theoretical physics at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid on the outskirts of the Spanish capital city. After that, I moved to Geneva to be closer to the experiment and to complete my Ph.D. Before arriving at NIU in 2023, I was a postdoc at Michigan State University. 

Research Interests 

I am part of the ATLAS Collaboration, which brings together around five thousand physicists, engineers, technicians, and support staff worldwide to manage and operate the ATLAS detector. This massive particle detector was built underground at CERN to analyze the products of proton-proton collisions being produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  

Although I started my career measuring known physics processes to high precision my current research is focused on searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model, the basic framework that captures our current knowledge of particle physics. In particular, my team and I focus on searches with multiple third-generation quarks in the final state (top quarks and bottom quarks). The large mass of these heavy quarks, especially in the case of the top quark, makes them particularly interesting to understand Higgs boson properties and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking 

We also participate in the upgrade program of the ATLAS detector for the next era of LHC data taking, the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), to start in 2029. This improvement for the LHC will allow us to achieve much larger instantaneous luminosities than with the baseline LHC program, growing the data available to the experiments by one order of magnitude. The ATLAS detector must undergo several modifications to maintain or improve its capabilities in challenging HL-LHC conditions.  

Selected publications and/or grant funding

A comprehensive list is available on Orcid