Cristina Mantilla-Suárez is an experimental particle physicist joining the Department of Physics as an assistant professor. Mantilla-Suárez is broadly interested in two of the most relevant questions in modern particle physics: understanding the properties of the Higgs boson particle and studying whether dark matter has a particle nature just like ordinary matter. Her work is performed with accelerator-based experiments that use energetic and highly intense particle beams to generate huge numbers of particles.

Mantilla-Suárez is a collaborator in CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland, and in her most recent work, she and her collaborators studied interactions of the Higgs boson, including the interaction of the Higgs boson with itself, in a very energetic regime. This research uses artificial intelligence to dramatically improve the identification of particles produced in those collisions. Mantilla-Suárez will also be involved in the construction of the Light Dark Matter Experiment at UVA, an experiment that aims to produce and detect dark matter with a precise electron beam.

Mantilla-Suárez grew up in Quito, Ecuador, surrounded by the Andes mountains where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in physics. She was an intern at Fermi National Laboratory in Chicago before pursuing her Ph.D. and then later returned to Fermilab for her postdoctoral research. She obtained her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, during which time she was awarded the 2021 Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award in Experimental Particle Physics by the American Physical Society.

Besides teaching, Mantilla-Suárez looks forward to mentoring students at UVA, testing particle detector components for the LHC and building the LDMX experiment.