Marcela Carena

Marcela Carena is the Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Carena is an award-winning distinguished scientist, who has been jointly appointed as a theoretical particle physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) (1996 - 2024)  and a physics professor at the University of Chicago (2008 – present), where she is a member of both the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. She was formerly the Director of the Theory Division at Fermilab. Her research explores the possible connections between the Higgs boson, dark matter, and the origin of matter in the universe. She has been a leader in exploring radical new concepts such as supersymmetry and warped extra dimensions, particularly in showing how these ideas can be tested in experiments. She has worked closely with experimental physicists at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, at Fermilab and the University of Chicago, creating and implementing strategies for discovery. Recently, she has been exploring ideas at the boundary between particle physics and quantum information, to tackle problems of quantum theory and the early universe. In 2022, Carena was honoured as a US Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow for leadership and influential contributions to particle physics and promoting Latin American participation in US-hosted experiments. In 2010, Carena won the Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and she was a Simons Distinguished Scholar at the Kavli Institute in Santa Barbara in 2013. Earlier in her career she was a John Stuart Bell Fellow at CERN and was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission to conduct her research at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY). Carena has been the chair of the Division of Particles and Fields as well as of the Forum on International Physics of the American Physical Society. She has represented the United States at the Particle Physics Preparatory Groups for the 2020 European Particle Physics Strategy Update, as well as at the first community exercise for the Latin American Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructure in High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. She continues to be actively involved in efforts in Latin America and other countries to strengthen scientific collaborations at a global scale and open new opportunities for scientists from diverse backgrounds. She has been a member of several international scientific advisory panels around the world, including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada; the Serrapilheira Institute and the ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research in Brazil; and the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics and the DESY Physics Research Council in Germany. Carena has recently been a member of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s committee setting a vision for the field of elementary particle physics for the coming decades. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales of Argentina.