Poster Presentation in collaboration with Matthew Busch at the 2018 International Workshop on Double Beta Decay and Underground Science. “Design Improvements to Cables and Connectors in the MAJORANA DEMONTRATOR”
Island of Hawai’i, USA, October 21, 2018
Invited talk at the 2020 Conference on Neutrino and Nuclear Physics. Awarded one of two best talks given by a PhD student. “MAJORANA, LEGEND, and the Future of the Search for Neutrinoless Double-β Decay in 76Ge”
Cape Town, South Africa, February 24, 2020
“Once every year, around 30-40 Nobel Laureates convene at Lindau to meet the next generation of leading scientists: 600 undergraduates, PhD students, and post-doc researchers from all over the world”
– Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings
Lindau, Germany, July 4, 2019
I am a fourth-year international PhD student in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). I completed my B.S. in Physics at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), in my home country of Ecuador. My undergraduate research focused on quantum optics as an exchange student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but eventually shifted to high energy physics. In 2014, I participated in the CERN Summer School Program where I conducted research on ionization chambers. This was the subject of my honors thesis, which I defended in 2015. I have served as a Teaching Assistant at UNC and USFQ and have taught physics and mathematics in various locations from the Galápagos Islands to Canada.
I am currently a member of the MAJORANA and LEGEND collaborations searching for elusive neutrinoless double-beta decay in 76Ge. During the 2020-2021 academic year, I will perform HPGe detector scans as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.
In a time when the divide between science and the general public seems wider than ever, becoming a wide-reaching science communicator has become a decisive goal. I have experienced first hand the joy that science education can bring to a child while volunteering in rural Ecuadorian communities. I strive to inspire and empower others, especially those who, like so many in my home country of Ecuador, come from disadvantaged populations.
For a recent profile by UNC Graduate Student Diversity follow this link.