Prof. Marcela Carena is the Executive Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. She is also jointly appointed as a particle physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and a physics professor at the University of Chicago, where she has been a member of both the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.
Prof. Carena is a renowned particle physicist who has advanced our understanding of fundamental mysteries of science related to sourcing the mass of the fundamental particles in nature, the origin of matter in the universe and the nature of dark matter. She has been a leader in exploring radical concepts such as electroweak baryogenesis, supersymmetry and warped extra dimensions, particularly in showing how these ideas can be tested in terrestrial experiments or cosmic observatories. Her most recent research program explores particle physics and quantum information to tackle problems of quantum theory in the early universe.
Prof. Carena is an original co-author of the Status of the Higgs Boson review of the Particle Data Book. In 2022, Carena was honored as a U.S. DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow. In 2010, Carena won the Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and in 2013, she was a Simons Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kavli Institute in Santa Barbara. She was a staff member and a John Stuart Bell Fellow at CERN and was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship of the European Commission to conduct research at DESY.