College of Arts and Sciences Professor Marina Artuso (Department of Physics) has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was elected by the AAAS Council for extraordinary achievements in her field and her efforts on behalf of the advancement of science. The fellows will be honored at a ceremony later this year in Washington, D.C.
Marina Artuso
Artuso joins a prestigious list of Syracuse University professors who have been named AAAS Fellows. Since 2010, these A&S faculty received the honor: Jennifer Ross, professor and department chair of physics and Jason Wiles, associate professor of biology (2023); Alan Middleton, professor of physics (2016); George Langford, dean emeritus and professor emeritus of biology (2013); M. Cristina Marchetti, professor of physics (2013); Donald Siegel, professor emeritus of Earth and environmental sciences (2012); and William Starmer, professor emeritus of biology (2011).
“Professor Artuso’s colleagues at Syracuse University have known for over three decades that she’s an outstanding experimental physicist,” says Stephen Maisto, associate dean of research in A&S and professor emeritus of psychology. “Her receipt of the AAAS Fellowship reflects that now the international community of scientists is aware of the quality and significance of Professor Artuso’s research.”
Established in 1848, AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and the publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science. Fellows are elected by the AAAS Council through a careful deliberation process to preserve the honor attached to this recognition. Each Fellow is acknowledged with a citation recognizing their contributions to the scientific community.
Professor Artuso’s citation reads: “For leadership in experimental particle physics, particularly in studies of the B-meson and development of new and innovative instrumentation.”
A Syracuse professor since 1991, Artuso has been working with an ongoing, multinational experiment known as Large Hadron Collider “b” (LHCb) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland since 2005; she has been a Syracuse team leader there, directing the high-energy physics group, since 2021. She and her team study subatomic exotic particles resulting from collisions in the LHC, a 27-kilometer-circumference tunnel in which proton beams are made to collide, producing concentrated energy that mimics the conditions in the early Universe.
Each glimpse into how the resulting subatomic particles—specifically quarks and the gluons that bind quarks together—behave and interact helps researchers better understand how the microworld works, putting together the complex puzzle of where the antimatter that was once present went, and the very origins of the Universe.
The instrumentation required to collect this data is necessarily extraordinarily sensitive; Artuso and her colleagues spent a decade designing and constructing the Upstream Tracker (UT), a detector able to capture precise imaging of the particle debris. Just this year, she and co-principal investigators, professors Steven Blusk, Matthew Rudolph, Rafael Silva Coutinho, Tomasz Skwarnicki and research professor Raymond Mountain, received a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for the project, Development of UltraFast High Granularity Modules for Timing Layers for the LHCb Upgrade 2 and Future Collider Calorimeter Applications—to yield an even more sensitive detector.
This is the latest of a dozen NSF grants Artuso has received in her time at Syracuse for her work in various aspects of heavy quark physics, and in developing the instrumentation used to detect atomic and subatomic particles and their behavior. She received the Chancellor’s Citation for Faculty Excellence and Scholarly Distinction at Syracuse in 2008. She has been Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2008.
Her leadership extends beyond her work in physics to her dedication to diversifying the STEM workforce, both on the Syracuse campus and beyond.
“Marina Artuso has been a long-time advocate for women in physics,” says Jennifer Ross. “She was an original member of the group of women scientists and engineers who created the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) group on campus. She is currently on the organizing committee working to host the Conference for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics (CU*iP) meeting next January.”
The funding from her grants is channeled largely into Syracuse research, and Artuso has always made it a vital part of her educational mission to include students—at the graduate and undergraduate levels and even at local high schools—helping them to be part of state-of-the-art physics research.
“[Her] AAAS Fellowship status identifies Syracuse University as an institution in which world-renown scientists do their research and train the next generation of scientists,” says Maisto. “It also helps to build the reputation that SU is a place where quality research is done.”
