Paraskevas Sphicas

Paris Sphicas FRS
Born	Paraskevas Andreas Sphicas Greek:Παρασκευάς Σφήκας (1963-07-13)July 13, 1963
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology(BS, PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Particle physics
Institutions	CERN National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Thesis	Search for a high-mass resonance decaying to jets in proton-antiproton collisions(1988)
Doctoral advisor	Jean Pierre Revol
Website	www.iasa.gr/people/sphicas

Paraskevas Andreas SphicasFRS(Greek:Παρασκευάς Σφήκας) is aparticle physicistwho focuses on studies ofHigh energycollisions in theLarge Hadron Colliderthrough which he exploressupersymmetryand the mechanism ofspontaneous symmetry breaking.He is a senior scientist atCERNand professor of physics at theNational and Kapodistrian University of Athens.He was elected aFellow of the Royal Society(FRS) in 2019.

Education

Sphicas received hisBachelor of ScienceandPhDdegrees in Physics from theMassachusetts Institute of Technologyin 1984 and 1988 respectively.Sphicas worked on his PhD thesis at theUA1 experimentinCERN,looking for newresonancesthat decay intojetsand studying the production of multiple particle jets.

Career and research

After obtaining his doctorate, he continued at CERN, researchingtopandbottomquarks. He moved back to the US in 1990 when appointed a Wilson Fellow byFermilab.He worked on theTevatronat theCollider Detector at Fermilab(CDF). In 1991, he joined theMassachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT), becoming Associate Professor in 1994 and then Professor in 1997.

Sphicas continued work on the CDF through the 1990s as part of MIT's team in the CDF experiments. The MIT Team was responsible for three Collider components: the forward calorimeter, theData Acquisition Systemand the Third Level Trigger. The 18 MIT scientists, by then led by Sphicas, were part of the team that produced the first evidence for theTop quarkin 1994.

Sphicas began participating in theCompact Muon Solenoid(CMS) experiment at CERN in 1994. His early contributions included the development of the Data Acquisition System and the High Level Trigger for CMS, and also the setting up of the Physics Reconstruction and Selection division. In 2002, he moved from MIT to CERN to focus on the CMS. He was also appointed as Professor of Physics at theNational and Kapodistrian University of Athensin 2002. He worked in several supervisory roles in the CMS experiment, as it progressed towards the discovery of theHiggs bosonin 2012. He co-chaired the publication committee of the experiment in 2012-13 and was then appointed deputy spokesperson for the experiment for three years beginning in 2014.

Sphicas is currently working on the upgrade of the level-1 trigger system of the CMS, preparing for theHigh Luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Colliderat CERN, set to complete by 2026. He has also been serving as the chair of European Committee for Future Accelerators since January 2024.