Mayda Velasco is a

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

. She works in experimental particle physics and is a leading member of the CMS Collaboration at the

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundre ...

. She founde
COFI
and is its first director. She is a pioneer in the physics potential of photon colliders.

Early life and education

Velasco went to high school at

Academia Maria Reina Academia Maria Reina is a Catholic middle (7th to 12th) and high school for girls in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Educative mission Academia Maria Reina is a school of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Brentwood, New York. The educative mission of thi ...

San Juan, Puerto Rico San Juan (, , ; Spanish for "Saint John") is the capital city and most populous municipality in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States. As of the 2020 census, it is the 57th-largest city under the jur ...

. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the

University of Puerto Rico The University of Puerto Rico ( es, Universidad de Puerto Rico, UPR) is the main public university system in the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. It is a government-owned corporation with 11 campuses and approximately 58,000 students and 5,3 ...

(Rio Piedras) and attended graduate school in physics at

where she obtained her PhD in 1995 with Donald Miller and Ralph Segel as advisors.

Research activities

Velasco's research career spans a wide range within experimental particle physics. She obtained her Ph.D. by making the first measurement of the spin structure function g2(x) using data collected by the Spin Muon Collaboration. She became a CERN Post-Doctoral Fellow in 1996 with Heinrich Wahl as her advisor. At CERN, she joined the

NA48 experiment The NA48 experiment was a series of particle physics experiments in the field of kaon physics being carried out at the North Area of the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN. The collaboration involved over 100 physicists mostly from Western Europe ...

Collaboration. This experiment made precision measurements of neutral kaons especially as regards

CP violation In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of CP-symmetry (or charge conjugation parity symmetry): the combination of C-symmetry (charge symmetry) and P-symmetry ( parity symmetry). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the ...

. It also investigated rare kaon decays. Velasco formed her own collaboration to perform the NA59 experiment at CERN. This experiment demonstrated the channeling of high energy particles in bent crystals and studied the production of circularly-polarized high-energy photons. This topic connected well with her pioneering work in the physics potential of photon colliders, which she advocated at the Snowmass Meeting in 2001. Following that meeting, she promoted the

Compact Linear Collider The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is a concept for a future linear particle accelerator that aims to explore the next energy frontier. CLIC would collide electrons with positrons and is currently the only mature option for a multi-TeV linear coll ...

(CLIC) accelerator at CERN. Velasco joined the faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at

in 1999. At that time she joined the Main injector oscillation neutrino search (MINOS) Collaboration to study neutrino oscillations. She left MINOS to join the CMS Collaboration at

- one of the two general-purpose experiments at the CERN

—where she continues to play a leadership role. Her work has an important impact on the current understanding of the

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Stand ...

: she spearheaded the rare Z+photon decay channel which, in principle, can distinguish the standard model Higgs boson from those beyond the standard model.

Awards and distinctions

Velasco was awarded a Fellowship from the

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support or ...

in 2002. She also received a

Woodrow Wilson Fellowship The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) is a nonpartisan, non-profit based in Princeton, New Jersey that aims to strengthen American democracy by “cultivating the talent, ideas, ...

from the Mellon Foundation and she is a recipient of the CERN Achievement Award. She holds the UNESCO Chair on Fundamental and Interdisciplinary Physics Professorship at Northwestern University since 2018. This position was established in support and recognition of COFI, which Velasco founded in 2014. Velasco serves as a member of the

High Energy Physics Advisory Panel The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) is a permanent advisory committee to the United States Department of Energy and the National Academy of Sciences, created in 1967 and organized under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) of 1972. ...

(HEPAP) that advises the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

. Velasco was given the Dean's Award for Diversity in 2015.

''Colegio de Física Fundamental e Interdiciplinaria de las Ámericas'' (COFI)

Velasco founded the ''Colegio de Física Fundamental e Interdiciplinaria de las Ámericas'' (COFI) in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2014. COFI hosts full-time students and scientists from Puerto Rico, the continental United States, and abroad to collaborate on emerging fundamental science projects. The institute also provides advance training programs and public lectures. She is its first General Director.

References

External links