Maria Spiropulu, Experimental Particle Physicist, CERN

Maria Spiropulu is an experimental particle physicist. Born and educated in Greece, she became interested in experimental physics early on and worked in international laboratories in Europe (BESSY, CERN) as an undergraduate. She moved to the US in 1993 to pursue her Ph.D. at the Collider Detector at Fermilab with Harvard University. She has worked on silicon sensors, calorimetry, trigger and data acquisition and on searches for physics beyond the standard model. She used the "blind" data analysis method in a challenging analysis with hadron collider data. She developed and implemented background determination methodologies and algorithms that have become the standard at Fermilab's experiments and are used by experiments at the LHC in preparation for data analysis in 2007. The particular results on her search for supersymmetry were the best yet obtained and have been quoted in the Particle Data Book since 2001. By analyzing the debris of very high energy particle collisions, she is looking to find whether extra dimensions or supersymmetric particles are relevant to the physics that connects the high energy scale of gravity and unification with the scale of elementary particle masses. She is the recipient of the Enrico Fermi Fellowship and Compton Lectureship at the University of Chicago. She moved in 2004 to Geneva, Switzerland with a staff position at CERN's Physics Department to continue her research at the highest energy experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.