Marcela Carena

Marcela Carena is a distinguished scientist and the head of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. She received her Diploma in Physics from the Instituto Balseiro of Bariloche, Argentina, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Hamburg. She was a John Stuart Bell Fellow at CERN, was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship, and she was a CERN staff member in 1999-2000. She has been a Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago since 2008, where she is both a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.
Her research explores the possible connections between Higgs physics, supersymmetry, unification, and dark matter. She has developed promising ideas to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in the universe, which are under scrutiny at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Carena has worked closely with experimental physicists, creating and implementing strategies for testing the latest ideas for the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. She was a pioneer in exploring the complementary interplay between direct searches for dark matter in deep underground experiments and searches for Higgs bosons at the LHC.
Carena has been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 2002. In 2010 she won a Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and in 2013 she was a Simons Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. She is at present actively involved in developing agreements with European and Latin American countries to facilitate the collaboration between Fermilab and international institutions in projects of common interest, in particular, the exciting international Long Baseline Neutrino Facility/Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (LBNF/DUNE).