Speranza Falciano - Biography#
Speranza Falciano graduated in Physics with laude at University of Rome, Sapienza in 1978 and started her scientific activity at CERN joining the Omega Prime project, a general facility at SPS devoted to a wide range of experiments in hadron physics.
From 1979 to 1983, first as a CERN Fellow and then as a member of the research group of Prof. Valentine Telegdi at the Federal Polytechnic of Zurich (ETH), she participated to the NA10 experiment for the high statistics study of the production of inclusive muon pairs through high intensity pion beams on heavy nuclear targets.
In 1982 she got a permanent research position at INFN in Italy joining the Rome Bubble Chamber Group engaged at CERN in a series of experiments on charm physics using hybrid detection and in particular the small LEBS bubble chamber coupled to the European Hybrid Spectrometer (EHS). She contributed to the trigger and the data analysis of the NA27 experiment, in particular the measurement of lifetimes, production characteristics and decay properties of the charmed mesons D and Λc. NA27 was an experiment that has produced world-class results on charm physics.
In 1984 she joined the L3 Collaboration at the Large Electron Positron collider at CERN (LEP), directed by the Nobel Prize Professor Samuel C. C. Ting, where she carried out her research until the closing of the accelerator in 2000. She was a Visiting Scientist at CERN twice during the experiment. In L3 she contributed mainly to the construction, commissioning and running phases of the experiment, in particular by collaborating in the design and implementation of the high-level trigger and data acquisition system both for the experiment and the calibrations of the electromagnetic calorimeter made of 12.000 BGO crystals. She has been responsible, since 1993 until the end of the experiment, of the third level trigger that has undergone several hardware and software evolutions to adapt to the changes in the detector and accelerator operating conditions (from 4 to 8 bunches and increased energy of the beams). The L3 experiment contributed to the precise determination of the number of neutrino families from the single photon channel, to numerous and important precision measurements on vector bosons and on the search for the Higgs boson.
For more than fifteen years she has been part of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (LHC) where she had a relevant role in the muon detector and the high level trigger. In particular : she contributed to the definition of the readout system of the detectors of the muon spectrometer; she made original contributions to the ATLAS TDAQ system, proposing the creation of hardware and software common to all detectors and a data selection scheme for the self-calibration of the drift chambers of the spectrometer; she studied in detail all the hardware and software aspects to interface the muon detectors to external systems (slow control, trigger, DAQ, online and offline software, etc.); she contributed to the definition of Level-2 trigger algorithms for the reconstruction of muons in the central detector and the implementation of the algorithms in the online system and offline simulation; she participated in the trigger performance studies, especially for the B-physics during the low-luminosity LHC operation; she promoted a significant Italian participation in the combined test beam of one of the eight sectors of the ATLAS barrel and the forward muon chambers, a unique and important example of pre-integration and testing of all the spectrometer components considering that ATLAS is an apparatus of huge size.
In ATLAS she has been part of several bodies both nationally and internationally, covering several positions such as that of Level-2 Trigger coordinator for six years. This resulted in the proposal of a pilot project lasting three years which was the basis of the activities of the groups involved in the design and construction of the trigger until 2003, date of publication of the Technical Design Report of this project. She was responsible for the initial commissioning on the experimental site of the High-Level Triggers (farm of hundreds of processors running complex event reconstruction algorithms with online filtering functions) until she was appointed as Director of the INFN Division of Roma Sapienza.
The ATLAS experiment, together with the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC in Geneva, announced on 4 July 2012 the discovery of the Higgs Boson, a great achievement that will remain in the history of physics and science. After long years of construction and development of the apparatus and of the reconstruction of events in the complex ATLAS detection systems, the international collaboration was indirectly rewarded on October 2013 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Higgs and Englert whose theories have been confirmed from the experimental data of ATLAS and CMS.
She was Director of the INFN Division in Rome Sapienza and the Associated Group of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Rome, Italy) from June 2005 to July 2011. From November 2011 to 31 December 2019 she has been a member of the INFN Executive Board. She held the position of Vice-President of the Institute in the periods 2012-2013, 2015-2016 and 2018-2019.
During the period of the INFN directorate and more as a member of the INFN Executive Board, she devoted many efforts to the application of high energy physics technologies to other fields such as biomedicine, cultural heritage, the environment. The introduction at INFN of a Technology Transfer Office and a renewed National Committee for the Technology Transfer has allowed a significant increase in the number of patent applications, collaboration agreements with industry and the creation of spin-off companies.
She is a member of numerous joint committees of INFN with other scientific institutions (e.g. CNR and INGV). Since 2012 she is a member of the Italian delegation to the ESRF (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility) Council in Grenoble, France. In April 2016 she was elected member of the EPS (European Physical Society) Council as delegate of one of the associated institutions for two years. She is actually a member of the Governing Bodies of the University of Sassari, Italy, of the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) of Trento, Italy and of the GARR Consortium, the Italian Network for Research and Universities. Recently she has been nominated member of the Scientific Committee of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of INFN, Italy and Alternate of the Italian representative in the subgroup Research Infrastructure of the Shadow Strategic Program Committee of Horizon Europe.
Her scientific activity is documented by more than 1200 publications in international journals, internal notes and CERN reports and from dozens of seminars and invited reports to national and international conferences.
She has been teaching at the University of Rome Sapienza University for about ten years as contract professor. She has been supervisor of several degree and doctoral theses.
