Syracuse University physicist appointed to prestigious national science advisory panel

Syracuse University physicist appointed to prestigious national science advisory panelFebruary 11, 2009Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

Marina Artuso, professor in the Department of Physics in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences, was recently appointed to the national High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). The panel advises both the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation in the ongoing effort to advance high-energy physics research and to support U.S. leadership in the field.

“We are extremely proud of Professor Artuso’s pioneering work and congratulate her on her appointment to this prestigious national panel,” says College of Arts and Sciences Dean George Langford. “The appointment recognizes her outstanding contributions to the field of high-energy physics and the impact of her research on the national and international scientific communities.”

A fellow of the American Physical Society, Artuso is a highly respected leader in the field of high-energy physics. Much of her work has focused on the development, design and construction of novel detector technologies and electronics for elementary particle physics experiments. In addition, she has a long-standing interest in furthering the understanding of the basic properties of matter by studying the properties of exotic charm and beauty quarks. Quarks are elementary particles of matter found in neutrons and protons.

Artuso is among a group of SU physicists who are actively involved in one of four collaborative experiments at the 17-mile Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. In her role as test beam coordinator for the LHCb Velo project at CERN, Artuso helps develop specialized tests to gain a better understanding of how the detector will perform under long-term exposure to the violent collisions in the LHC.

Artuso is now turning her attention toward physics analyses that exploit the unique properties of the LHCb vertex detector. She is also actively involved in the design of the next-generation VELO system, which will significantly enhance the physics reach of the experiment.

Closer to home, Artuso was instrumental in designing a particle identification system for the CLEO Ring Imaging Cherenkov detector (RICH), which was built at SU in 1999 and installed in Cornell University’s high-energy Electron Storage Ring. Artuso’s design for the RICH detector earned her international recognition from the European Physical Society during the 7th Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors in Italy. CLEO was a collaborative, high-energy physics experiment funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy from 1978 through March of last year.

Over the years, Artuso has been a principal or co-principal investigator on a number of large grants from the National Science Foundation in the areas of heavy quark physics, the development of pixel detector devices for heavy quark physics, BTeV research and development at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, charm physics at CLEO-c and beauty physics at LHCb, to name a few. Her research has resulted in hundreds of publications in the broad areas of particle detector development, design and construction; nuclear and intermediate energy physics; heavy flavor physics data and analysis; and the future of b-quark particle physics.

Artuso has been, or currently is, a member of numerous national and international panels, task forces and committees, including co-leader of the CLEO-c task force, BTeV experiment technical board member, the Fermilab Directorate Review Panel member, and a member of the CERN RD50 International Collaboration.

She is a 2008 recipient of SU’s Chancellor’s Citation for Faculty Excellence and Scholarly Distinction and serves as co-director of SU’s Women in Science and Engineering Program (WISE).

Born in Italy, Artuso earned a Ph.D. in physics at Northwestern University in 1986. She worked at Columbia University and Cornell University before joining the SU faculty in 1991 as a research assistant professor of physics. She was promoted to professor in 2005.