The Severo Ochoa Programme brings to the IFT the privilege of serving as the scientific host of the prestigious “la Caixa” Fellowships. Together with a number of other institutes of excellence in Spain and Portugal, “la Caixa” INPhINIT PhD fellows, as well as “la Caixa” Junior Leader postdoctoral fellows, have the opportunity of carrying out their projects in the stimulating environment of IFT.
“la Caixa” Junior Leaders
Rafael Alves Batista
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Rafael did the PhD in Hamburg (Germany) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (UK), the University of São Paulo (Brazil), and a Radboud Excellence Fellow at the Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. Rafael was Junior Leader Fellow at the IFT from 2021 until February 2024. He is currently a Junior Professor Chair at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris at the Sorbonne Université, in France. His main research interests are multimessenger astroparticle physics, cosmic magnetic fields, indirect dark matter searches, structure formation, and astrobiology.
Thomas Biekötter
thomas.biekoetter@desy.de
Thomas did his PhD at the IFT and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) and Karlruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), both in Germany. Thomas is at present Junior Leader Fellow at the IFT. His main research interests cover the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking, dark matter, the phenomenology of extended Higgs sectors, collider physics and gravitational waves.
Stefano Gariazzo
stefano.gariazzo@gmail.com
Stefano did the PhD in Turin (Italy) and after that he moved to IFIC in Valencia, were he hold a Juan de la Cierva – Incorporación contract and a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellowship within the COFUND project Fellini. Stefano is Junior Leader Fellow at the IFT since 2023. His main research interests are neutrinos, especially how they impact the evolution of the universe since their decoupling and until today, and statistical methods for phenomenological studies.
“la Caixa” INPhINIT
Alessandra Grieco
alessandra.grieco@estudiante.uam.es
Alessandra enrols at the University of Modena in 2018 to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in physics, graduating with top marks in 2021. Having discovered an interest in theoretical physics, she decides to enroll in the Master’s degree program at University of Padova which is specialized in the theoretical physics of fundamental interactions. She graduates with top marks in 2023 with a Master’s thesis that explores aspects of generalized symmetries in supergravities and string theory compactifications. She is now pursuing a PhD in theoretical physics. Her work focuses on string theory and quantum gravity mainly in the context of the “Swampland program”.
Karen Macías Cárdenas
karen.macias@estudiante.uam.es
Karen obtained a B.Sc. in Physics from Universidad Autonóma de Baja California (Mexico) in 2020 and a master’s degree under the supervision of Aaron Vincent at Queen’s University (Canada) in 2022. They are currently a la Caixa Doctoral INPhINIT Fellow at IFT under the supervision of David Cerdeño and Marina Cermeño. Karen’s main research interests are phenomenological aspects of Dark Matter and neutrinos. Specifically, she explores models of DM-neutrino and neutrino self-interactions with cosmological, astrophysical and particle physics data.
Luca Melotti
luca.melotti@uam.es
Luca obtained his Bachelor’s degree in physics from University of Padova in 2019 and two years later his Master’s degree from the same institution, with a thesis about string theory compactifications and the Swampland Program. He is currently doing his PhD at IFT, under the supervision of Fernando Marchesano. His main research interests regard geometric aspects of string compactifications and their low energy effective field theories.
Indira Ocampo Justiniano
indira.ocampo@csic.es
Indira is currently doing her PhD at the IFT under the supervision of Savvas Nesseris. She studied physics at the “Higher University of San Andrés” in La Paz, Bolivia and obtained her Master’s degree at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in Astrophysics, and then she followed the High Energy Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics predoctoral program offered by the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste. Her interests are Machine Learning applied to Large Scale Structure data analysis and model comparison with theories beyond LCDM.
Lorenzo Paoloni
lorenzopaoloni1997@gmail.com
Lorenzo got a B.Sc. in Physics and a M.Sc. in Theoretical Physics, both at the University of Bologna in Italy. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT) under the supervision of Fernando Marchesano. His main research interests focus on Quantum Gravity, String Theory, and their phenomenological implications.
Matteo Zatti
matteo.zatti01@uam.es
Matteo studied at the University of Padova, where he obtained his B.Sc and M.Sc in Physics. He is currently a fourth-year PhD student in theoretical physics at the IFT. During his PhD, he pursued research in complementary research lines. Under the supervision of Prof. Fernando Marchesano, he studied superstring compactifications. Under the supervision of Prof. Tomas Ortin, he studied string theory black holes and black hole thermodynamics. He is interested in studying gravity beyond general relativity: quantum gravity, string theory, the swampland program, black hole physics, asymptotic symmetries, and holographic entanglement.