María Moreno Llácer is a senior researcher working at IFIC (Instituto de Física Corpuscular), a joint center of the University of Valencia (UV) and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), Spain. She is an experimental particle physicist and, since 2007, member of the ATLAS experiment (one of the largest worldwide collaborative efforts in science) at CERN, Switzerland. That summer, she graduated in Physics in Valencia and had the opportunity to join the CERN summer student program where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was about to start. It was an historical moment and she wanted to participate in such great adventure. Her research lines focus on studying the two most special elementary particles of the Standard Model: the Higgs boson (the particle that explains why the rest of the elementary particles have mass) and the top quark (the most massive elementary particle, even heavier than the Higgs boson itself, and therefore the coupling among the two is very intense). Understanding the interaction of these two particles among themselves and with the others, as well as precise measurements of their properties and searches for "new physics", are the main objectives of her research. Due to the large amount of data from the LHC and the low signal-to-background ratios, she employs multivariate analysis and machine learning techniques. She also collaborates with theoretical physicists to understand all the uncertainties that affect the measurements and the interpretation of the experimental results based on new theories. She has also contributed to data taking at the control room, the commissioning of the detector, and upgrades and developments for the next LHC runs. She has coordinated several working groups of the ATLAS scientific collaboration and LHC working groups. She has presented results at various international conferences and has been invited to give seminars or colloquiums at prestigious research centres. She has been awarded with three research prizes: Young Investigator Award in Experimental Physics 2018 from the Royal Spanish Physics Society and BBVA Foundation, Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award 2018 from Brookhaven National Lab., and the XV Ciutat d'Algemesí Scientific-Technical Award. She also is very active in outreach, mentoring programs and scientific organizations, and has teaching responsibilities. She loves traveling, enjoying nature and being with friends.

-- FassiFarida - 2021-04-12