Our motivational speakers for the Job Matching Event Spring 2024 are Dr. Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez (ATLAS), Dr. Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli (CMS) and Dr. Natalie Heracleous (former CMS)!
They will give their motivational talks between 13:00-14:00 CEST on Tuesday 14th May, covering their career journeys to their current positions as well as any advice for pursuing a career in academic and non-academic sectors. The talks will be virtual and the Zoom link can be found on this page.
Dr. Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez:
Dr. Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez is a Spanish-Swedish particle physicist that works at Uppsala University in Sweden where she teaches physics in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy and Engineering Sciences. A member of the ATLAS Collaboration since 2018, she started her career in the CMS Collaboration (2006-2018) looking for the Higgs boson for her PhD thesis. After being based at CERN for a decade, working for institutes in Belgium and the US, she now leads a growing research team in Sweden. A Higgs boson and top quark expert, today she keeps looking for answers to long standing questions in the field searching for new phenomena at the LHC and beyond, in the particle colliders of the future.
Dr. Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli
Dr. Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli is an assistant Professor of Physics in the department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University since fall of 2022. They work primarily in the field of high energy nuclear physics since their masters at Stony Brook University back in 2011. Their masters thesis was in the setup of a simulation package for the future Electron Ion Collider called EICROOT where they studied the interaction of lepton-flavor violating processes. After doing their PhD work at Rutgers University (2013-2017) with measurements of QCD jets in varying collision systems at the CMS experiment at CERN, they moved their research back to RHIC science during postdoc positions at Wayne State University (2017-2022) and Yale/BNL (2020-2022) with the STAR collaboration. At Vanderbilt University, their main focus is on the new sPHENIX experiment at RHIC and the CMS experiment at LHC along with EIC physics heading into the future. They were recently awarded the DOE Early Career award for 2023 focused on measurements of the space-time evolution of quarks and gluons at RHIC. They are also an NSF funded co-PI of the JETSCAPE collaboration which includes both theorists and experimentalists focused on creating advanced analysis and statistical toolkits to extract fundamental properties of the QGP.
Dr. Natalie Heracleous is a Medical Applications Physicist at Groupe 3R, a network of diagnostic centers in Switzerland, contributing to AI advancements in healthcare and improving patient outcomes. She obtained her Ph.D. in Experimental Particle Physics from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, in 2013. Previously, she spent over 8 years as a member of the CMS Collaboration and worked within the CERN Radiation Protection Group on detector applications for medical purposes for 4 years.
