Professor Daniela Bortoletto OBE
BA Universita' degli Studi di Pavia (Italy), PhD Syracuse University (USA), Fellow APS, Fellow AAAS, Honorary Fellow IOP
Senior Kurti Research Fellow
I am the Head of Particle Physics at the University of Oxford. I was born in Domodossola, a small town in the Italian Alps, and became the first in my family to attend university. After earning my degree in physics from the University of Pavia, I moved to the United States to complete my Ph.D. at Syracuse University. My research in experimental particle physics has taken me from the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab to the identification of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Before joining Oxford in 2013, I was the E.M. Purcell Distinguished Professor of Physics at Purdue University. I am deeply committed to mentoring young scientists and advancing the participation of women in physics, driven by a lifelong passion to understand the fundamental structure of the universe.
I am a particle-physicist with a long-standing interest in exploring the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions. My work spans from precision measurements of the top quark and Higgs boson, to the design, construction and operation of advanced silicon detector systems that make these discoveries possible.
In my earlier career I participated in the CDF experiment at Fermilab, where I contributed to the measurement of the top quark production rate and searches for the Higgs boson in final states with heavy quarks and missing energy. Building on that, I contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson at the CMS experiment of the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012.
Since moving to the ATLAS experiment at Oxford, my research has focused on studying the Higgs boson’s couplings — especially to fermions (for instance its decay to b-quarks), searching for additional Higgs-like particles and invisible decays, and improving detector instrumentation to handle the high luminosity of future colliders.
A major part of my work involves detector-R&D: developing ultra-thin, radiation-hard silicon pixel sensors and read-out chips; building large-scale pixel modules for the upcoming High-Luminosity upgrade of ATLAS; and exploring novel monolithic CMOS detectors for future experiments.
Oxford Physics
I’m passionate about advancing both the technologies that enable high-energy physics and the deeper physics questions themselves — which means striving for ever greater precision, increased sensitivity to rare processes, and ultimately searching for signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model.
https://youtu.be/UFyTi5PAPxE?si=XuA9Xn7saAA27GFt