Faculty

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: Director of the Master and responsible for the course "Frontier Research in Astrophysics and Particle Physics".
Patricio Vielva is a CSIC Tenured Scientist working at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC - UC). His research field is Observational Cosmology, particularly the study of the cosmic microwave background and the large-scale structure of the universe. He was a member of the ESA Planck Collaboration, coordinating the activities related to the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, and the isotropy and statistics within the LFI Core Team. He is also member of the QUIJOTE experiment, the JPAS collaboration and external member of the LiteBIRD experiment. He has large experience supervising Ph.D., Master and undergraduate students.

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: Director of the Master and responsible for the course "Frontier Research in Astrophysics and Particle Physics".
Gervasio Gómez obtained his Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of Maryland and is currently a CSIC Tenured Scientist at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC - UC). He specializes in experimental particle physics. He has been a member of the D0 and CDF international collaborations at the Tevatron proton-positron collider in Fermilab (USA), and is currently a member of the CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider in the CERN laboratory (Geneva). He has done physics analysis of electroweak and top physics processes, and more recently he is involved in particle physics instrumentation, focusing on the development of Silicon sensors for ionizing radiation. He is currently the leader of the Inner Tracker (silicon pixel) sensors group for the CMS high-luminosity upgrade and the Principal Investigator of the CMS Upgrade and Analysis coordinated project involving IFCA, Instituto Tecnológico de Aragón (ITAINNOVA) and Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona - Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica (CSIC). He has supervised and is currently supervising Ph.D. and Master students.

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - University of Cantabria.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Statistics and Data Analysis".
Francisco J. Carrera is Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universidad de Cantabria. His main research activity is finding out about Active Galactic Nuclei through multi-wavelength surveys and Machine Learning. He is the Director of the Athena Community Office, which helps managing the community supporting that ESA Large mission. He is also co-chair of one of the Science Working Groups of Athena "Understanding the build-up of Supermassive Black Holes and their host galaxies" closely related to his science, in which he is also helping shape the large survey which will be performed by that mission.

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - University of Cantabria.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Programming in a scientific environment".

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - University of Cantabria.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "The Standard Model of Particle Physics".
Alberto Ruiz Jimeno is a senior researcher of the Cantabria Institute of Physics (CSIC- University of Cantabria), full Professor of Atomic, Molecular and Nuclear Physics of the University of Cantabria since 1991, Scientific Associate of CERN, since 1976 and Visitor Scientific of the Fermi National Laboratory, Fermilab, since 1999. He is the founder of the High Energy Group of the Institute of Physics of Cantabria, and Coordinator of the Spanish Network for Future Colliders, since 2005. He is presently the Vice-Rector for Doctorate and Institutional Relations of the Cantabria University.
He has directed 10 doctoral theses on topics of high relevance in experimental particle physics. He is presently member of the Award Thesis Committee of the big collaboration CMS at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN. He was the founder of the first Doctoral School in Spain, the one of the University of Cantabria, in 2010. He participated in the creation of the Spanish Conference of Directors of Doctoral Schools, of which he has been Secretary of the Permanent Commission, until 2016. He is member of the European network in doctoral education (EUA-CDE) since 2011. He has been involved in several scientific policy committees, doctoral and research panels. He was the Spanish Delegate of the European Committee for Future Accelerators (1989-1998) and the Restricted European Committee for Future Accelerators (1998- 2001). He is presently member of the Government Board of the Spanish Physics Royal Society and President of the Cantabria Local Section. He has participated in several experiments with particle accelerators: DELPHI at the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN, CDF at the Tevatron collider of Fermilab, and CMS at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. He is also member of the future linear collider projects, ILC and CLIC, and elected member of the Executive Board of the International Linear Detector (ILD).

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - University of Cantabria.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Physics of the Cosmos".
The main research topics are: (a) extragalactic radiosources, (b) radio quasars, (c) extragalactic surveys, and (d) instrumentation for large telescopes. Igacio's research activity is based on surveys of different kinds, although most are at radio frequencies: (a) extragalactic radio jets in surveys such as 3C, 4C, and B2; (b) participation in the survey WENSS at 92 cm (Westerbork Northern Sky Survey); (c) participation in the survey ELAIS (European Large Area ISO Survey) in the infrared; (d) QSOs in the survey B3; (e) search for high-redshift QSOs based on surveys FIRST (20 cm), SDSS (optical), and UKIDSS (NIR); (f) participation in X-ray surveys RIXOS and ROSAT UK Medium Sensitivity Survey. In the last Ignacio has been working on the physics of high-velocity outflows from Broad Absorption Line (BAL) QSOs from observations at radio wavelengths (VLA, VLBI), infrared spectroscopy, and intermediate-high optical spectroscopy (VLT, HST, Keck).
On the instrumental side, Ignacio is a member of the Instrument Definition Team of OSIRIS, first light instrument at GTC telescope. He has been involved in the requirements definition, viability analysis, scientific cases, and has been the responsible of the design of the OSIRIS user software: data reduction, mask designer and exposure time calculator (ETC).
Teaching: teacher since 1991 at the Universidad de Cantabria at the Physics and Mathematics grades and Physics Masters. Ignacio teaches several topics in Physics and Astronomy (Physics of the Cosmos, Quantum Physics, Atomic Physics, Mathematical Methods for Physicists, Mathematical Physics, Statistics, Extragalactic Astrophysics, Observational Techniques in Astronomy, FORTRAN programming, Galaxies).

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Detection methods and techniques in particle physics".
Ivan Vila Alvarez is a senior staff researcher at CSIC and member of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria. He completed his PhD (1994-1999) in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN; contributing to the successful development of a novel amorphous-silicon radiation-tolerant position-sensitive-detector used for the position monitoring of the muon and tracker subdetectors.
After his PhD, He joined the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration at the Tevatron hadron collider. He contributed to the design, installation, commissioning and operation of the Time-of-Flight (ToF) subdetector, coordinating the detector calibration group.
Concerning the physics analysis, Ivan's main interest was the physics of the beauty quark as an indirect low energy probe for new-physics objects; in particular, to achieve, for the first time, the observation and measurement of the mixing frequency of the B0_S meson system, an observable expected to be, at that time, very sensitive to new physics induced deviations. The excellent and unprecedented performance of the ToF subdetector in combination with a dedicated trigger on displaced tracks were instrumental in determining the B_0s mixing frequency, arguably one of the paramount outcomes of the CDF Run II period.
In 2005, as tenured member of the IFCA particle physics group, he started a new line of R&D on tracking and vertexing detectors in close collaboration with the IMB-CNM radiation detector group. Out of this common effort, novel detector concepts and technologies were proposed with expected major impact in the future generation of tracker and vertex detector systems for the future linear collider experiments and LHC upgrades. In the data analysis side, he is member of the CMS collaboration contributing to the measurement of the WZ diboson production cross section, a clean experimental signature that also provides a better understanding of the standard model background to the associated Z and Higgs production channel.
More recently, Ivan Vila Álvarez led the invention of a new characterization technique for semiconductor sensor based on non-linear multi-photon optics. During 2016, this technique was successfully employed on the study of the radiation tolerance of the HV-CMOS pixel sensors; obtaining an understanding of the radiation-induced mechanisms responsible for the sensor performance degradation well beyond de current state-of-the-art.
Additionally, Ivan Vila has participated and led several technology transfer projects related with the nuclear civil sector; these activities include the creation of an awarded spin-off company and patents.
Ivan Vila has been principal investigator of more than seven research projects funded by the Spanish science system and the European Union and Guarantor Researcher of the Spanish Excellent Program María de Maeztu, he has published more than 1300 papers on international journals. Ivan Vila has supervised four PhD students. Since 2019, he is serving as head of the Experimental Elementary Particle Physics Group at IFCA.

Affiliation: University of Cantabria.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Extragalactic astrophysics".
Luis is a full professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Cantabria. In more than 35 years in higher education and research, Luis taught many subjects in the three major areas of modern physics: Nuclear Physics, Theoretical Physics, and Astronomy & Astrophysics. Luis has a broad research career in the field of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and has spent much of the past 25 years studying extragalactic lens systems, i.e., background quasars that are gravitationally lensed by foreground galaxies. This gravitational lensing research is developed under the Gravitational LENses and DArk MAtter (GLENDAMA) project. Luis has published more than 100 scientific articles, directed several doctoral theses, and organized various R&D activities. He has also refereed/reviewed articles in the main journals of his field, projects and contracts of different national and foreign agencies, and proposals for astronomical observation time.

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - University of Cantabria.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Cosmology".

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - University of Cantabria.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Analysis tools in particle physics".

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "High performance computing".
Dr. Álvaro López García is a research associate at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He holds a Ph.D. in Science, Technology and Computing from the University of Cantabria (UC). He was a visiting researcher at the IN2P3/CNRS Computing Center in Lyon, France and a research associate at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). He is also an assistant professor at the UC, teaching several Computer's Architecture subjects, as well as professor at the official Master degree in Data Science of the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP). He has taken part in several national and EU IST RTD projects such as EGEE-II/III, Int.Eu.Grid, EUFORIA, EGI‐InSPIRE, EGI-Engage (task leader for the Federated Cloud JRA), INDIGO-DataCloud (task leader for the Cloud Computing Virtualization JRA, Technical Board member) and AARC-II. He is currently the coordinator of the EU H2020 DEEP-Hybrid-DataCloud project, participating also in the the EU H2020 EOSC-Hub and EOSC-Synergy projects.

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: responsible for the course "Multi-messenger exploration of the Universe".

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: Assistant in course "Analysis tools in particle physics".
Lara Lloret Iglesias obtained her Ph.D. in particle physics at the University of Oviedo working on the search for the Higgs boson. Then she worked as a postdoc in the 'Laboratory of Instrumentation and Particle Physics', in Lisbon, conducting supersymmetry searches within the CMS experiment of the LHC, at CERN. From 2015 to 2017, she developed the online data acquisition system for the CERN CT-PPS experiment. Since 2017 she is a postdoc researcher at the IFCA Advanced Computing group where she has specialized in the development of Deep Learning applications. She currently directs the Master in Data Science organized by the University of Cantabria and the UIMP.

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: Assistant in course "Programming in a scientific environment".
Dr. Jordi Duarte-Campderros' scientific interests broadly lies in the physics frontier of the Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) field. His main research lines lies in the study of potential new phenomena in EPP and R&D of technology to detect particles in EPP experiments. He is currently working on the characterization and study of new extreme radiation-tolerant pixel sensors prototypes, which are potential candidates to be mounted on the tracker detectors of the CMS upgrade project for the High Luminosity LHC. In addition, he is interested in new sensor technologies to improve granularity in time and position to reconstruct particle trajectories in particularly hostile environments.
For the past few years, Duarte-Campderros used data collected by the ATLAS particle detector at CERN to search for long-lived particles, while improved the trajectory reconstruction algorithms of ATLAS to be able to reconstruct such exotic signatures. He started his research career by measuring and studying key electroweak processes using CMS data provided by the LHC, during the initial stage of the machine. In that time he was involved in several Standard Model analysis topics, which include flavor physics, event selection on Higgs searches and production properties of diboson processes WW and WZ .
Duarte-Campderros has supervised several undergraduate projects in the Universidad de Cantabria and Tel Aviv University. He is supervisor of CERN Summer Students projects, and he is currently supervising a Ph.D. thesis in the Universidad de Cantabria. He is also co-teaching 1 undergraduate Physics course (Particle Physics) and a section of a master degree physics course at the Universidad de Cantabria.

Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC.
Role in Master: Assistant in course "Statistics and data analysis".
Dr. M.Teresa Ceballos graduated in Physics at the University of Cantabria in 1991 and Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1996. She joined the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC-UC) in 2006. She is currently staff scientist CSIC at IFCA. She is instrument co-Investigator of the Athena X-IFU and member of different consortia and international groups for active (XMM-Newton) and in progress (Athena) X-ray missions: Survey Science Centre (SSC) and Software Analysis System Group (SASWG) for XMM, Athena/X-IFU consortium, Athena Working Groups/Topical Panels MGW5.1 (Science Ground Segment) and MWG5.4 (End to end simulations). She has participated in 18 national research projects, last 3 as Coordinator PI, oriented to the research in X-ray astronomy as well as to the development of space missions, all of them obtained under competitive concurrence. She also coordinates the Spanish participation in the AHEAD2020 EU project (2020-2024). She has participated in national networks focused to the exploration of new technologies for the data management (IFCA-ESAC-GRID collaboration). Member of the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA) from 2015-2018.
She has coauthored around 37 peer-review papers in the main international journals of the field (A&A, MNRAS,JLTP, etc) and more than 60 proceedings of the most relevant technological meetings (ADASS, SPIE, COSPAR, etc.) both in Astronomy and also in Materials or in astronomical software development. Also co-author of around 20 technical notes for the different consortia. She has been awarded 3 ‘sexenios’ (6-years research periods).
Her teaching experience refers to Post-graduate courses at the UC master in Physics and UC/UIMP master in "Physics of Particles and Cosmos" and the Degree of IT Systems at the CU Melchor de Jovellanos (University of Linconshire and Humbershire, UK).
Leader of the Athena Community Office's (ACO) Public Outreach department, she is deeply involved in many outreach initiatives organized by IFCA, SEA or ACO such as Science Week, Researchers at schools, Women and Girls in Science, Mentorship of young girls in Science, Open Days, etc.

Affiliation: Instituto de Ciencias del Espacio - CSIC.
Role in Master: Assistant in course "Multi-messenger exploration of the Universe".
Carlos F. Sopuerta graduated in Theoretical Physics in 1992 and received his doctorate in Physics in 1996 at the University of Barcelona (UB). Later he was an LRU assistant professor of Theoretical Physics at the Department of Fundamental Physics of the UB (1996-1998). He has held several postdoctoral positions: Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany, 1998-2000); Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom, 2000-2003); Postdoctoral scholar at the NSF Frontier Center for Gravitational Wave Physics at Penn State University (USA, 2003-2006); Postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Physics of the University of Guelph (Canada, 2006-2007). From 2007 to 2012 he was Researcher Ramón y Cajal at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC-IEEC). From 2012 to 2017 he was Senior Researcher at the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC). Since 02/2017 he is a Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Space Sciences of CSIC.
His research belongs to the area of Relativistic Astrophysics and Gravitation, with focus on the recently inaugurated area of Gravitational Wave Astronomy, and covers a variety of topics, from theoretical studies to studies for the design of a gravitational-wave space-based observatory (including the proposal for LISA, selected by European Space Agency (ESA) as its future L3 mission in June 2017), including: modeling of gravitational wave sources; astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics with gravitational wave observations; numerical relativity; algorithms of data analysis for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, etc.
He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of several research grants of the Gravitational Astronomy-LISA group at ICE (CSIC and IEEC), including the participation in the LISA Pathfinder mission, LISA, and STE-QUEST (more than 2.37 million euros). He is also the PI of several supercomputing grants (more than 2.5 million CPU hours). He is a Member of: The LISA Consortium Board (Spanish representative); the LISA Science Study Team of ESA; Core member of the consortium for ELGAR (European Laboratory for Gravitation and Atom-interferometric Research); the Einstein Telescope (ET) Scientific Team, a future third-generation ground gravitational-wave detector. He was also a Member of: The Science Working Team (Spanish representative) of ESA's LISA Pathfinder mission; Member of the Science Team and co-IP of STE-QUEST, an ESA M-Class mission candidate whose aim is to test the Einstein Equivalence; Member of the NINJA collaboration for the study of gravitational wave detection algorithms (for terrestrial detectors) using waveforms generated with Numerical Relativity. Since at the ICE (CSOC), he has supervised five PhD theses. Currently he supervises two doctoral students and two master and bachelor thesis. He is also professor of the Master in Astrophysics, Cosmology and Physics of High Energies of the UAB and of the Master in Particle Physics and the Cosmos of the UIMP/UC/CSIC.