Dr Holly Pacey
Before being elected as a Research Fellow in 2020, I completed my PhD and MSci in Physics at King’s College, Cambridge. My research interests lie in searching for the fundamental ingredients of the universe beyond our “Standard Model” of particle physics, and understanding how they behave. I am a member of the ATLAS collaboration, the largest experiment in the Large Hadron Collider complex at CERN.
During my PhD I searched for supersymmetry, leptoquarks, and unexpected lepton charge-flavour asymmetries hiding within proton-proton collision data produced by the ATLAS detector. Following this, my current research looks at inventing better ways to search for new physics in ATLAS data. My focus is on broader searches for deviations from the Standard Model, for example using machine learning and graph theory. I also work on improving ATLAS’s ability to infer the presence of undetectable particles like dark matter, through the measurement of “missing transverse momentum”. Occasionally I will appear in a clean room, helping to construct silicon strip modules for the ATLAS detector’s updated tracking system: the ITk.
Outside of research, I can often be found salsa dancing, weight-lifting, or knitting; but not all at once.
