Profile

I am from Madrid but I have been living away since I was 16. I spent two years in an international boarding school in India and then moved to the UK for university. This is my second year in Durham and even though is a small town, I love it! Apart from physics, I like to teach and to practice sports. I teach physics and mathematics to high school students and help other undergraduates at Durham with their physics and mathematics modules. I am also a member of the boxing and judo clubs. I have been doing judo for over 15 years but two years ago, I decided to pick up boxing as well. This year, I am also in charge of the fitness sessions for boxing. I have also been playing the violin for more than 10 years and nowadays, I try to practice occasionally. I also love traveling and meeting new people from all over the world!

Neutrinos are some fundamental (indivisible), tiny, neutral particles. Neutral means that they do not have an electric charge (like for example, electrons do). Therefore, they are very difficult to see! However, one can build some huge detectors to find them. In addition, our visible universe shows only a 5% of all its matter content. 68% of it is something that we do not understand very well and therefore, we call it Dark Energy (because it sounds mysterious) but the other 27% is something we know it exists:  Dark Matter. Dark Matter is very similar to a neutrino since it is also neutral and cannot easily be seen. However, it is more elusive and in fact, we still have not detected it yet! However, we know that Dark Matter weights and which explains why some galaxies rotate faster than they should!  Nevertheless, there are many properties of Dark Matter (like how much it weights) that we do not know yet and I try to understand them by studying how Dark Matter interacts with neutrinos.

On a typical day, I try to wake up at a reasonable time and get into the office before noon. I usually start the day by checking the new scientific publications in my field (there are usually about 20-30 per day) and I read the ones that I find interesting. Afterwards, I usually do some pen and paper work, double checking my equations with a computer or using computer programs to tests some ideas.  Additionally, I do a bit of more elaborated coding to simulate what we could see on a real experiment, trying to understand if some experiments could be used to test our theories. Some evenings, I attend a seminar or a journal club, where we present and discuss different scientific papers in a group, other days I help undergraduates with their exercises. When I finish work, I attend judo or boxing training (depending on the day of the week) and if it is not too late, I usually give an online class to some of my high school students.