Profile

I’m originally from Venezuela but have lived in Europe since 2008.

I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College. After you finish your Ph.D., if you plan to stay in Academia and eventually become a lecturer/professor, you have to do a couple of “postdocs”. They are 2-3 year positions where you are an independent researcher and are supposed to build a profile that allows you to get a more permanent job. At the moment, the average sits around 3 such postdocs before you get a permanent position. This is my second one.

My research has to do with proposing and testing new particle theories that aim to address the shortcomings of the Standard Model, an outstandingly successful theory but still incomplete.

Lately, I’ve focused on using the fact that some theories predict that the universe could experience “vacuum decay”, where a bubble filled with a universe with different physical laws can appear and engulf everything. If a theory makes such a prediction, it can be a way of falsifying it, because after all, we are here.

I collaborate with researchers from all over the world, which is a typical aspect of particle physics today. I do a lot of programming, but also a lot of reading and calculating with pen and paper.

I think it is hard to describe a typical day. If I’m not abroad at a conference or working with collaborators in other universities, then I usually come to the office. While I don’t always arrive at the same time, I usually stay at least 8 hours there.

Depending on the current state of my different projects, I might read and learn about something, check out the articles that came out that day on “the arxiv” (a repository of pre-prints), work on computer code for doing calculations and analyses for my research, or just have discussions with collaborators around our ideas and current results.

There are always talks and seminars I can attend, which I usually do if I find them interesting. They can be very inspiring even when not directly related to my area of research, and sometimes can be a lot of fun!

Sometimes I work a bit on my Art & Science collaboration projects, where it is even harder to describe what a typical day is.

Outside of work, I usually wind down by reading something outside of physics, playing a bit of guitar or video games or meeting/skyping with friends. An unfortunate downside of an academic career is that you end up with friends scattered around the world, and you have to put considerable effort to keep contact and connections.