The first researchers participating in the IFAE Severo Ochoa Visitor Programme have now begun their stay at the institute. This programme supports short- and medium-term visits by leading international researchers, with the aim of strengthening ongoing collaborations and fostering new lines of work across experimental and theoretical particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.
Maarten Golterman
Maarten Golterman is visiting IFAE for the full academic year, from August 2025 to August 2026, from San Francisco State University, where he is currently a faculty member. Originally from the Netherlands, he obtained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam. Golterman is a theoretical particle physicist working on topics such as the muon anomalous magnetic moment, the strong coupling, effective field theories for models with a dilaton, and the construction of chiral gauge theories on the lattice. During his stay at IFAE, he is collaborating with Santi Peris on different aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).
Julian Sitarek
Julian Sitarek is a Professor at the Department of Astrophysics in the Faculty of Physics and Applied Informatics of the University of Łódź (Poland), Prof. Sitarek is a leading expert in gamma-ray astrophysics and currently serves as Physics Coordinator of the MAGIC Collaboration. He will stay at IFAE until late February 2026, collaborating closely with the Gamma-ray group. During his visit, he will contribute to the development of advanced statistical techniques for the analysis of follow-up observations of astronomical transients, a rapidly growing field driven by multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics.
Antonio de Maria
Antonio de Maria obtained his PhD in Physics through a joint doctoral program between the University of Pisa (Italy) and the University of Göttingen (Germany). His doctoral research focused on the cross section measurement of the Higgs boson in di-tau final state in the light lepton plus hadronically decaying tau final state. His research interests include Higgs boson measurements, as well as Beyond Standard Model searches with hadronic taus. He is a member of the ATLAS Collaboration. At IFAE, he is visiting the ATLAS group and contributing to data analyses focused on leptoquark searches as well as di-Higgs searches.
