- Nikolina Šarčević
Name: Adam Coogan
Current position: Postdoctoral researcher
Affiliation: GRAPPA, University of Amsterdam
Field of research: The nature of dark matter using astrophysical data. I work on improving theoretical predictions and developing new data analysis techniques.
What is your career trajectory to date? I did my undergraduate degree at Brown University from 2008 to 2012, my PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2012 to 2018, and since then have been a postdoctoral researcher at GRAPPA, part of the University of Amsterdam.
What are the most exciting open questions in your research area? What is the fundamental nature of dark matter?
What do you like and dislike about being a scientist? Likes: developing research questions, figuring out how to solve technical problems to generate impactful results, wrangling code, and working with creative, sharp and kind people at all levels from students to faculty. Having a flexible schedule and getting to travel are also big perks. Dislikes: the precarity of my career. Worrying about finding a permanent position, having little control over where I live, dealing with the feeling that I need to work all the time, and the lower pay relative to industry.
Which of your skills are you most proud of, or find most useful? I'm most proud of my ability to break problems down into pieces and solve them with math and programming. I think I'm good at writing software.
In your career so far, at what point were you the most excited, and what were you excited about? Two come to mind: - The first observation of gravitational waves. It felt like such a big deal to have a new way to probe the universe. - Getting first results for a project last fall that uses machine learning methods to analyze strong gravitational lensing images to search for dark matter. I'm very excited about the potential of this method, and it felt great to see some payoff after ~1.5 years of work with my collaborators.
What new skills would you like to learn in the next year? I want to learn how to analyze Hubble Space Telescope and LIGO/VIRGO data. I also would like to improve as a mentor!
What advances or new results are you excited about or looking forward to? Since I work on strong lensing, I'm eagerly awaiting Euclid, Vera Rubin Observatory and the Extremely Large Telescope, all of which will come online in the next few years. These will increase the number of galaxy-galaxy strong lensing systems we know about from O(100) to O(10^5)! Further down the line, I'm looking forward to LISA, and thinking about what it can do for dark matter searches as well as the data analysis difficulties.
What is the biggest obstacle that is slowing down your research field right now? I think the hardest thing about working on dark matter is that we have an enormous range of models to study, and it's difficult to narrow the scope without observational hints about where to focus.
What role do you think a community network like EuCAPT can play in developing theoretical astroparticle physics and cosmology in Europe? Astroparticle physics and cosmology have a lot of niches, and I think it's useful to have EuCAPT as a channel for improving communication between them. I'm optimistic it will help with find collaborators and keep track of interesting developments in adjacent subfields.
What’s your favorite food?
So hard to choose! Pizza napoletana with mozzarella di bufala is one of the top, for sure. I also love burritos (especially from Taqueria Santa Cruz II!), ramen and kimchi.
How do you like to relax after a hard day of work? Cooking some new tasty dish -- I've been making lots of Korean food over the past year. Baking and watching Netflix with my partner. I also like to run, read, draw and work on learning languages.
Do you have any non-physics interests that you would like to share? I've been obsessed with rock climbing since the beginning of my PhD, and used to go on climbing and camping trips quite often when I lived in California. I'm looking forward to being able to climb again once the pandemic gets under control.
If you were not a scientist, what do you think you would be doing? I would find a way to apply my technical problem-solving skills to help with some of the big problems facing the world, like climate change, inequality or improving health care. I'd like to get a van so I could travel around exploring the outdoors while working remotely for part of the year. Further down the line I could see opening a little restaurant.
What do you hope to see accomplished scientifically in the next 50 years? I really hope we figure out what dark matter is.
- Nikolina Šarčević
Name: Armando di Matteo
Current position: Faculty
Affiliation: INFN Sezione di Torino
Field of research: Astroparticle physics, in particular ultra-high-energy cosmic rays
What is your career trajectory to date? I did my BSc, MSc and PhD at University of L'Aquila in Italy until 2016, a postdoc at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium from 2016 to 2019, and now I have a permanent position at INFN in Italy.
What are the most exciting open questions in your research area? The environment(s) where and the mechanism(s) by which ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are produced (basically, all of my career is devoted to answering these questions).
What do you like and dislike about being a scientist?
I like being able to work on what I am excited about rather than just on what I am told to work on, having a pretty flexible schedule most of the time, and travelling for work a lot (though not recently, due do the pandemic). I dislike having a few extremely busy periods every few months, occasional feelings of a lack of motivation, and the extreme lack of job security for young people (personally, I've had a permanent job for two years now, but nowadays this is pretty rare even for people my age, let alone younger ones).
What advances or new results are you excited about or looking forward to? The main observatories for detecting ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are being extended with several hundred new scintillation detectors, which will take data which will help us discriminate between various theoretical hypotheses. In addition, machine learning techniques look very promising for extracting more information from the data we already have.
What is the biggest obstacle that is slowing down your research field right now? The collaborations operating the main observatories for detecting ultra-high-energy cosmic rays do not openly share all of their data, either with each other or with the rest of the community, hence full-sky studies require ad hoc agreements between collaborations, and historically there has been some reluctance in participating in such joint studies, mostly for "sociological" reasons, though recently the situation is improving. A model such as the one used in gravitational wave detection, where the two main collaborations have de facto merged and do all their analyses together — or ideally even the one used by certain other astronomical facilities, which release all of their data to the public a reasonably short period after they are taken, would be much more conducive to studies requiring full-sky data. Furthermore, the pandemic has delayed the ongoing upgrades of the observatories, though not as much as I feared it could.
What role do you think a community network like EuCAPT can play in developing theoretical astroparticle physics and cosmology in Europe? It might be useful for conducing to more cooperation between researchers from different subfields, and to produce "unified" recommendations to funding agencies. But we should keep in mind that it can sometimes be difficult for people from very different communities to understand and work with each other, and we should not forget the importance of also cooperating with researchers outside Europe.
What’s your favorite food? Too many different ones to just pick one!
Have you lived in a different European country than you do now? If so, would you like to tell us something about it, e.g. a fond memory or something you found surprising? I lived one year in Ireland as an Erasmus student back in my MSc and three years in Belgium as a postdoc, and I was amazed by how much more "international" those countries are than Italy. For example, the overwhelming majority of students and faculty in Italian universities and research institutions grew up in Italy, whereas elsewhere almost half of them are foreigners.
How do you like to relax after a hard day of work?
Before the pandemic, I liked to go to bars and have a few beers, especially when there was live music (and I even played the bass in a rock band when I was younger). Nowadays, I mostly just watch TV series on Netflix with my girlfriend. But I plan to resume getting out more after nearly everybody in my area can get vaccinated and there isn't much danger of the situation getting as serious as it was last year. I also read lots of books and blogs.
If you were not a scientist, what do you think you would be doing? Most likely a computer programmer or data analyst of some sort. I would also have liked to be a professional musician, but I realize I would have had very little chance of actually becoming one.
What do you hope to see accomplished scientifically in the next 50 years? From an idealistic point of view, a complete theory of quantum gravity unifying general relativity and quantum field theory in a consistent way, and an explanation of dark matter. More pragmatically, some advance in condensed matter physics and similar fields allowing more energy-efficient technology and cheaper, more capacious energy storage.
- Nikolina Šarčević
Name: Miguel Sánchez-Conde
Current position: Faculty
Affiliation: IFT UAM-CSIC
Field of research: Dark matter, astroparticle physics and cosmology
What is your career trajectory to date?
I got my B.Sc. degree in Astrophysics from Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain) back in 2004, and my PhD in October 2009 at the Andalusian Institute for Astrophysics & University of Granada. Right after that, I started my postdoctoral experience at the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics. One year and a half later I moved to California to start a second postdoc at KIPAC/SLAC, Stanford University. In September 2014, I moved back to Europe as a 'Wenner-Gren' postdoctoral fellow at the Oskar Klein Centre, Stockholm University. Finally, in March 2017, I joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Madrid Autonomous University (IFT UAM-CSIC) as a “Comunidad de Madrid Atracción de Talento” senior researcher and founded my own research group, currently composed by several PhD students and postdocs.
What are the most exciting open questions in your research area? The nature of the dark matter particle is still a mistery to us, and the big question not only in my field but also for Science in general. Also, I'm particularly interested in shedding light at the smallest scales predicted by the standard cosmological model, yet unrevealed to us and thus still open to debate.
What do you like and dislike about being a scientist? I love Science and thus love being a scientist. I always did and I still enjoy my job every day. The freedom I have to choose interesting projects; the excitement I feel every time we start working on something new or every time we find something unexpected; the beauty of solving (either minor or major) scientific puzzles once the hard work is done... All of it is priceless. Also, being a scientist allowed me to travel all over the globe and meet other cultures and lots of interesting people. Probably the only thing I dislike about this profession is not having enough time to enjoy the details as much as I should. Indeed, I believe that the pressing need to publish works at a high rate makes the scientist's life not as enjoyable as it could/should be, especially for young people. It is also easy to fall into a swirl of crazy work at all times, hurting you and your loved ones in the process. I always find it difficult to meet the right balance between work and anything else.
Which of your skills are you most proud of, or find most useful? My background as an astrophysicist/cosmologist turned out to be particularly useful to build bridges between this discipline and the field of astroparticle physics, where I carry out my dark matter research. Being in between these two fields always helped me to find new avenues for further research, not obvious for others. Also, I believe I am good at connecting and coordinating people, efforts and tasks.
In your career so far, at what point were you the most excited, and what were you excited about? I was very excited when I became a member of the Fermi-LAT Collaboration in 2011 when I was a postdoc at KIPAC/SLAC, Stanford. Back then, many of us started to understand the great capabilities of the LAT in the search for dark matter via gamma rays. We performed the first LAT data analyses of the best astrophysical targets for our dark matter search, such as dwarf galaxies, the Galactic center, galaxy clusters, the extragalactic gamma-ray background... It was all 'terra incognita' and we all had lots of fun in Stanford, the epicenter of Fermi-LAT science in the world. I was also particularly excited around 2013-14 when I first realized of an important property of the inner structure of low-mass dark matter subhalos that people had not noticed before. I enjoyed every step in its understanding and characterization, as well as the corresponding dissemination of results.
What new skills would you like to learn in the next year? I would like to have a further insight on machine learning techniques that I could use for my and my group's research. I'd also like to acquire a more solid background on statistical issues relevant to my field of research.
What advances or new results are you excited about or looking forward to? I am still optimistic that we will soon discover the nature of dark matter and that gamma rays will play a major role in this discovery. I am also looking forward to definitely provide support to the standard cosmological model via the discovery of low-mass, dark galactic subhalos.
What is the biggest obstacle that is slowing down your research field right now?
What role do you think a community network like EuCAPT can play in developing theoretical astroparticle physics and cosmology in Europe? In my view, EuCAPT possesses a great potential to connect members in our community with similar research interests or common needs, to strenghten the links between the different groups and to canalize and coordinate big research efforts whenever needed. In this context, EuCAPT can be particularly helpful for young people as well.
What’s your favorite food? I love^2 Spanish ham ;-)
Have you lived in a different European country than you do now? If so, would you like to tell us something about it, e.g. a fond memory or something you found surprising? I lived in the US for 3 years and in Sweden for 5 years. Not only me but also my wife and kids had a lot of fun in both countries. Such a great people, such a great wilderness. We never stopped exploring them. Thus, fortunately, I have hundreds of 'golden' memories to share!
How do you like to relax after a hard day of work? Nothing like enjoying a glass of good Spanish red wine and good music at the sunset with my wife.
Do you have any non-physics interests that you would like to share? I have many! I love birdwatching. I am absolutely mad about soccer. I love music (rock, jazz). I also enjoy reading (mostly history) books. My family's passion is to travel.
If you were not a scientist, what do you think you would be doing? I can't imagine it but I guess I'd be reading and writing about History.
What do you hope to see accomplished scientifically in the next 50 years? The discovery of the nature of the dark matter particle.