Dr. Shreyasi Acharya
Shreyasi is a member of the ALICE collaboration and a postdoctoral researcher from LPC, Clermont-Ferrand, France. She has been working on heavy-flavor measurements with the ALICE experiment since her Ph.D. She obtained her doctoral degree from VECC, India in December 2021 and was awarded an ALICE Thesis awards in 2021. She is currently based at CERN and is involved in run coordination for the MFT detector. She has also been a member of the ALICE-India Juniors committee from 2018-2020. In her free time, she likes to connect with friends and family, go on a hike or a swim.
Dr. Johan Sebastian Bonilla
Johan Sebastian Bonilla Castro (they/them) is a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Davis working with the CMS experiment at CERN. Johan was also an ATLAS collaborator for six years, as an undergraduate and later a PhD student. Their doctoral thesis focused on jet substructure and top reconstruction in search for a super symmetric partner to the top quark. Today they continue working on jet identification and reconstruction of boosted massive particles in search of BSM physics, but they have also grown into the world of detector operations and upgrades. Johan is the first person in their family to pursue higher education and is involved in various dimensions of work in Diversity Equity and Inclusion. Johan identifies as Costa Rican American, as well as gender non-binary.
Dr. David Barney
After completing his Bachelors degree in Physics, and PhD in High Energy Physics, at Imperial College London, Dave moved to CERN as a “Fellow” in 1994, to work on CMS. He spent nearly two decades conceptualizing, prototyping, assembling and operating the 2-layer silicon-based calorimeter in the CMS endcaps: the Preshower. And he is still the overall responsible person for this detector. He has also been the project manager for the CMS Electromagnetic Calorimeter (of which the Preshower is one part) between 2013 and 2015, and in late 2015 joined the CMS High Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL) project as one of the people responsible for beam and system tests. Between 2000 and 2012 Dave was the CMS Education & Outreach Coordinator and, during this time, also led the International Particle Physics Outreach Group for a few years. Dave currently serves on a few boards, including the CMS Collaboration Board, CMS Management Training Group, EP Department R&D Steering Group and EIROforum (representing CERN).
He is currently a Group Leader at CERN for CMS Detector Activities (present and future) and, in his spare time, is practitioner and teacher of TaeKwonDo (Korean martial art) at CERN.
Dr. Lais Lavra
Lais is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh working on searching for lepton flavour violating decays and detector development at the LHCb experiment. Previously she was a post-doc at the Laboratoire de Physique de Clermont in France, working on rare radiative decays and commissioning the LHCb Scintillating Fiber Tracker. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she obtained her doctoral degree from the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (CBPF) with thesis research focused on CP violation measurements in charmless B decays and R&D for the LHCb Upgrade.
Dr. Elena Dall'Occo
Elena is a postdoctoral researcher with the TU Dortmund University working on the LHCb experiment. She obtained her PhD at Nikhef with a thesis on searches for heavy neutral leptons and on the R&D of silicon detectors for the VELO Upgrade, for which she received the LHCb Early Career Scientist award. She is currently searching for very rare decays of beauty mesons and focusing on luminosity and beam induced backgrounds, from the methodology to the design and operation of dedicated detectors. After coordinating the LHCb luminosity working group for a few years, she is now Deputy Operations Coordinator and Deputy Run Coordinator of the experiment.
Dr. Andrea Knue
Andrea obtained her PhD from the University of Goettingen in 2013 and has previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Glasgow, funded by a Feodor-Lynen fellowship from the Alexander-van-Humboldt foundation.
After that she continued her research at the MPP Munich and in Freiburg, where she obtained her habilitation in July 2022. She has been working for the University of Dortmund since April of this year.
Andrea has held subgroup convenerships related to top quark physics and MC modelling, and has been a convener of the ATLAS top group since Summer 2022. She loves teaching and was awarded a teaching award in 2015.
Dr. Sami Rasanen
Sami defended his PhD thesis on hydrodynamical modeling of heavy ion collisions in 2005. After his defense, going abroad for a post-doc was not an option due to family reasons, and he moved out of academia for two years. He “somewhat surprisingly” returned to academic research in 2008, when he became a post-doc in the ALICE Collaboration. Today he is the team leader of Finland in ALICE and newly elected member of the ALICE Diversity Office. His scientific interests are in jets, two-particle correlations, and ALICE FoCal upgrade.
For past 10 years, he has been a Student Wellbeing Adviser (“Goodie”) in his home institute, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Through these interactions, he has become more aware of the role of wellbeing, and this has led him to questions on work-life balance, group phenomena in teams, and counselling interaction. In future, he hopes to learn more on diversity.
Dr. Maximillian Swiatlowski
Max is an Associate Research Scientist at TRIUMF, Canada’s Particle Accelerator Centre; he was previously a McCormick Fellow at the University of Chicago, and received his PhD from Stanford University. He works on the ATLAS experiment, where he contributes to the triggering, reconstruction, and analysis of hadronic final states, with a special focus on using pairs of Higgs bosons to measure the Higgs self-interaction and the shape of the Higgs potential. Max was recently the convener of Jet/ETMiss group in ATLAS; has coordinated subgroups within the Trigger Upgrade, SUSY, and Jet/ETMiss groups; and has led several large analysis groups within the experiment. He is currently a member of the ATLAS Early Career Scientist Board, and in his spare time enjoys trail running and road biking.
