image: Prof. Teresa Marrodán Undagoitia
Credit: T. Marrodán Undagoitia/MPIK
Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Her research area is that of astroparticle physics, where she works on experiments searching for dark matter particles and the properties of neutrinos. This research is carried out with extremely sensitive liquid xenon experiments, in the XENONnT and, in the future, in the DARWIN/XLZD collaborations.
Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia obtained her PhD from the Technical University of Munich in 2008, for research on the measurements of light emission in organic liquid scintillators and the search for proton decay. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Zurich, supported by a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation, she became a permanent researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, where she has been a group leader since 2017. In 2014, she received the Habilitation degree at the Heidelberg University.
Within the XENON collaboration, Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia is responsible for the light sensors in both the XENON1T and the XENONnT experiments. These light sensors are the heart of these experiments and have been developed in collaboration with industry. In addition, Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia's group at MPIK plays a leading role in the data analysis of these detectors. Her lab research with a small-scale local detector has provided insights into the energy deposition of particles in the liquid xenon medium and is currently investigating its infrared emission, which could make future experiments more sensitive.
For more than ten years, Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia has been a member of the Editorial Board, an elected committee of six leading members within the XENON collaboration that oversees all publications and determines the publication strategy. Since 2019, she has been a member of the scientific advisory board of the Canfranc underground laboratory in Spain and since 2021 of the CAPA institute in Zaragoza. She is also very active in teaching and outreach, and has supervised many PhD, MSc and BSc students. At the MPIK, Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia has been the commissioner for the compatibility of family and work since 2018 and the contact person for doctoral students since 2022. In 2023, she was elected ombudsperson of the Institute.
As professor by special appointment at UvA, Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia will be embedded in the Nikhef Dark Matter group of the IoP-Institute for High Energy Physics, with which she already has many close collaborations. Her expertise will strengthen that of the Dark Matter group and optimally positions the group for the next generation of ultra-sensitive detectors such as DARWIN/XLZD. Future neutrino experiments such as DUNE, with UvA participation, will also benefit from the detection and analysis techniques that Prof. Marrodán Undagoitia brings. Her research expertise will also add an important component to the existing teaching of students, in particular at the MSc level.