birth_place nationality field work_institutions known_for image article_title name alma_mater
kastoria , west macedonia , greece greek particle physics caltech new at colliders methods to search for supersymmetry and extra dimensions `` maria_spiropulu_october_2013 '' . jpg maria spiropulu
 maria spiropulu harvard
maria spiropulu

maria spiropulu -lrb- -rrb- , is an experimental physicist at the california institute of technology .
she is a member of the cms collaboration at the large hadron collider where the higgs boson was discovered in 2012 .
maria spiropulu received her bachelor 's degree in physics from the aristotle university of thessaloniki in 1993 , and obtained her phd with the cdf experiment from harvard university in 2000 .
for her doctoral thesis , she applied for the first time in hadron colliders a novel double blind analysis method to search for evidence of supersymmetry .
she excluded a large part of the parameter space where susy particles were expected to emerge .
from 2001 to 2003 , spiropulu continued on the cdf experiment as an enrico fermi fellow at the university of chicago , using signatures of missing transverse energy to search for extra dimensions and supersymmetry .
in 2004 , she moved to cern as a research scientist with the cms experiment .
for the years 2005 to 2008 , she served as co-convener of the cms physics analysis group searching for supersymmetry and other phenomena beyond the standard model .
she was a senior research physicist at cern until 2012 , and has been professor of physics at the california institute of technology since 2009 .
she invented , with her student chris rogan and collaborators maurizio pierini and joseph lykken , a new set of kinematic variables -lrb- `` razor '' -rrb- targeting the discovery and characterization of new physics at the lhc .
spiropulu is the author of `` where is einstein ? ''
, the final chapter in `` my einstein : essays by twenty-four of the world 's leading thinkers on the man , his work , and his legacy '' .
she was elected in 2014 vice-chair of the forum on international physics of the american physical society .
