Staff spotlight: Dr Marcella Bona

Dr Bona’s research activity focusses on indirect and direct searches of physics beyond the Standard Model. The Standard Model of particle physics is a now well-established theory explaining how elementary particles interact and has allowed for extremely precise predictions, thus proving its effectiveness. The discovery of the Higgs boson represents the last piece in the puzzle of the Standard Model. However the Standard Model is not the full picture as it does not explain a number of phenomena: amongst them, the matter-antimatter unbalance of the universe and the existence and essence of Dark Matter. 

Dr Bona is a member of the ATLAS collaboration, an experiment taking data at CERN, Geneva: she contributes to the running, the calibration, the analysis and the management of the experiment. She is also deputy leader of the QMUL ATLAS group and leader of the QMUL ATLAS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger group. 

For three years Dr Bona has been convener of the ATLAS rare B decays working group and has been leading the search for rare B decays into two muons. She is currently convener of the UK ATLAS B physics working group.