My academic story

Ecuadorian, experimental particle physicist, currently working for Carnegie Mellon University at the CMS Experiment at CERN. My area of expertise is in particles decaying hadronically. I am interested in searches with jets, specially in the boosted regime.

The short version

I come from South America, Ecuador specifically, but I have been outside my beautiful country for a while now. The reason? I am in love with science, and unfortunately, I cannot do what I am passionate about in my own country. What am I passionate about? Well, that’s easy. I am passionate about particle physics, experimental particle physics specifically. At a young age, I read about CERN and the goals that they were pursuing, and I got fascinated. After that, it was decided that I wanted to work at CERN, and I wanted to become a particle physicist.

However, becoming a scientist is not as easy as you might think, especially coming from developing countries. Being smart or capable is not enough. In my experience, being in the right place at the right time is equally crucial as being smart.

Fortunately for me, I had the luck of meeting friendly, brilliant, and selfless people who helped me on my way through. Working like there is no tomorrow, luck, and meeting the right people are what made me the person I am today. And I am not even halfway through this journey!

My academic life

My Postdoctoral Research

Carnegie Mellon University - USA

I am currently studying the self-interaction of the Higgs boson in the di-Higgs production channel. Measuring the Higgs self-interaction is crucial for understanding the stability of the Higgs potential and has significant implications for physics beyond the Standard Model. My research focuses on the four b-quark decay channel and is expanding to improve current studies in the bbWW channel.

Additionally, I have a strong interest in workflow orchestration tools and analysis reproducibility. I have been advocating for the adoption of modern programming practices, including continuous integration (CI), extensive use of unit tests, and regular result replication using Snakemake and REANA.

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH-Zurich) - Switzerland

I studied the production of top quarks and the Higgs boson, focusing on the semileptonic and dileptonic decay channels of the top quarks and the decay of the Higgs boson into a pair of b-quarks at high transverse momentum. Additionally, my research concentrated on jets. I led efforts within the CMS collaboration on jet algorithms, jet substructure, tagging tools, and pileup mitigation techniques in the CMS trigger. I also worked on unfolding data related to high transverse momentum jets.

My Graduate Research

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - USA

My research focused on boosted jets during Run II of the LHC, supervised by Prof. Eva Halkiadakis. Typically, when a particle decays into two quarks at rest or with low momentum, the resulting particle showers (jets) can be reconstructed separately. However, for boosted particles (those not produced at rest), the decay products are more collimated, appearing as a single jet. I studied these boosted objects to distinguish between regular jets and those with internal substructure.

From a theoretical perspective, I explored a variation of supersymmetry (SUSY). In the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), each SUSY particle decays into another SUSY particle and a Standard Model (SM) particle, conserving R-parity. However, if R-parity is violated (RPV), a SUSY particle may decay into two SM particles. For more detailed information, please refer to the SUSY Primer. Link to thesis.

My Undergraduate Research

Escuela Politécnica Nacional - Ecuador For my undergraduate thesis, I searched for exotic particles, specifically colorons decaying into a pair of top quarks, resulting in a final state with four top quarks. This project was supervised by Dr. Francisco Yumiceva (Fermilab, currently at FIT). I conducted this analysis from scratch: generating a private production of a pair of heavy scalar bosons in Madgraph5, hadronizing my sample with Pythia8, passing it through CMSSW Fast Simulation, comparing the signal with background and data, and determining the best strategy to analyze my signal. Two analyses were performed: a simple cut-and-count analysis and a multivariate analysis using Boosted Decision Trees. Ultimately, we established the first limits on Standard Model four-top quark production and the pair production of the heavy scalar boson GH. Link to thesis.

My CV in PDF