Professor Francesca Di Lodovico

Professor  Di Lodovico is an internationally renowned physicist. She graduated from the University La Sapienza, Rome, and got her PhD at ETH/Zurich, working on the Higgs boson and SUSY searches at LEP-2. She then changed area of interest moving to b-physics at the B-Factory BaBar at SLAC for her postdoc, first at the University of Edinburgh and then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was awarded a lectureship at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in 2004, and established a neutrino physics group. She was awarded the 2007 ERC starting grant for her work on T2K. She was awarded a professorship within 8 years and was head of the Particle Physics Research Centre (PPRC) at QMUL. She is one of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Laureates.  She moved to King's College of London in 2019 to establish the Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (EPAP) group in the Department of Physics.

Research Interests

Professor Di Lodovico's current primary research interest is neutrino physics where she focuses on major open questions in physics like the origin of matter of antimatter in the universe and on the nature of neutrinos. She is the international project leader of the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment, a next generation neutrino experiment based in Japan. Furthermore, she is part of the current generation of long baseline experiment T2K, of which she is a member of the Near Detector Steering Committee, called G4, and its far detector Super-Kamiokande. Professor Di Lodovico's main interest is in the study of CP violation in the current and future generations of neutrino experiments. Furthermore, she is also interested in astrophysical neutrinos, in particular supernovas, and proton decays. Finally, Professor Di Lodovico is part of SNO+, whose primary goal is to understand the nature of neutrinos, i.e. whether Dirac or Majorana and ANNIE, a technical experiment at Fermilab, that aims to measure the neutron multiplicity in a Gd-doped water Cherenkov detector and uses for the first time in an experiment, the LAPPDs.