Three new Research Fellows at the Cluster

This fall, the Excellence Cluster Universe welcomes three new research fellows: Louise Oakes, Antonio Palazzo and Erandy Ramírez. For the last four years the Cluster’s fellow program has been very successful with a continuously increasing amount of applications. The Cluster is especially pleased to attract more and more outstanding female scientists. Hence, two out of three new positions have been assigned to women.

The first fellow to start was Antonio Palazzo, who joined the Cluster in the beginning of September in the field of astroparticle physics. During his PhD studies at the University of Bari, Antonio started to investigate the solar neutrino problem and its possible interpretation in terms of neutrino flavor oscillations. Then, during his stay at the University of Oxford, he studied the information attainable from cosmology on the absolute neutrino mass scale. For the last three years he worked at the University of Valencia, where he focused his research on theoretical aspects related to flavor transitions in matter, non-standard neutrino properties, and geoneutrinos.

In the end of September, Cosmologist Erandy Ramírez arrived at the Cluster. Erandy gained her PhD from the University of Sussex and worked at last at the University of Bielefeld. There, she studied mostly the phenomenological aspects of inflationary cosmology, like the possible link between the inflation field and the Higgs field, the phenomenology of inflationary models and the application of general relativity to dark energy and dark matter. At the Cluster, Erandy will work on a theory that gives rise to an understanding of why a process such as inflation takes place in the context of standard cosmology or modified cosmological models.

Last but not least, Louise Oakes started on October 1st. Louise just currently received her PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Oxford. Based at Fermilab in Chicago, she studied for her PhD thesis the CP violation in the B⁰_s meson system, which is an indirect search for physics beyond the standard model.  At the Cluster Louise will, among others, continue her work in heavy flavor physics, as she believes it could be the key to understanding significant puzzles such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe, and potentially reveal types of new physics which may be less accessible to direct search.