Research

I am a particle physicist working in the CMS experiment at the LHC. I am interested in discovering signatures of new heavy particles that could explain dark matter, and in precision studies of the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle. I also worked on the DØ experiment at the Tevatron from 2002 to 2014, where I was involved in discovering and studying single top quark production. In 2025, all LHC experiments were awarded the 2025 Breakthrough prize for the publications of the Run-2 data released between 2015 and 2024.

Check out my ORCID webpage with selected publications and basic biographical information, and here you can find my Academic Tree.

Some recent results with 13 TeV CMS data from my group:

Link to the Physics Department Calendar of events.

Teaching

Current courses: PHY254/440 - Fall 2024 - Particle Physics: MW 2:00-3:15PM BL 480
PHY122P - Fall 2024 - Electricity and Magnetism (self paced)

Office hours: Mondays 3.30-4.30pm; But feel free to stop by at any time if I am available.

Past classes at Rochester:

Talks

Here is a list of the seminar and conference talks I have given.

Book

Electroweak Symmetry and its Breaking World Scientific (2023)

ISBN: 9789811222245 (hardcover); 9789811222269 (ebook)

Fundamental interactions are mediated by bosonic fields, quanta of which are realized as particles. The properties of these fields typically obey certain symmetry rules. In this book we discuss the symmetry between two types of interactions - electromagnetic, which are familiar to anyone who turned on the electric lights, and weak, which govern the nuclear reactions that fuel the Sun. While there is a symmetry between these two types of interactions, it is broken. The unified theory of electroweak interactions was developed over 50 years ago. The Higgs scalar field named after one of the theorists that proposed it, is believed to be responsible for the breaking of the electroweak symmetry. Yet, it is only now after the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the LHC experiments, that we can study the mechanism of the electroweak symmetry breaking. This book discusses the theoretical developments that led to the construction of this theory, the discovery and the experimental observations that need to come to fully establish the validity of the model.