Biography

Ivan Vila Alvarez is a Professor of Research at Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), head of the Elementary Particle Physics Group of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria. He completed his PhD (1994-1999) in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN; contributing to the successful development of a novel amorphous-silicon radiation-tolerant position-sensitive-detector used for the position monitoring of the muon and tracker subdetectors.
After his PhD, He joined the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration at the Tevatron hadron collider. He contributed to the design, installation, commissioning and operation of the Time-of-Flight (ToF) subdetector, coordinating the detector calibration group.
Concerning the physics analysis, Ivan's main interest was the physics of the beauty quark as an indirect low energy probe for new-physics objects; in particular, to achieve, for the first time, the observation and measurement of the mixing frequency of the B0_S meson system, an observable expected to be, at that time, very sensitive to new physics induced deviations.
The excellent and unprecedented performance of the ToF subdetector in combination with a dedicated trigger on displaced tracks were instrumental in determining the B_0s mixing frequency, arguably one of the most important results of the CDF Run II period.
In 2005, as tenured member of the IFCA particle physics group, He lounched a new line on R&D on tracking and vertexing detectors in close collaboration with the IMB-CNM radiation detector group. Out of this common effort, novel detector concepts and technologies were proposed with expected major impact in the future generation of tracker and vertex detector systems for the future linear collider experiments and LHC upgrades. In the data analysis side, he is member of the CMS collaboration contributing to the measurement of the WZ diboson production cross section, a clean experimental signature that also provides a better understanding of the standard model background to the associated Z and Higgs production channel.
More recently, Ivan Vila Álvarez leaded the invention of a new characterization technique for semiconductor sensor based on non-linear multi-photon optics. During 2016, this technique was successfully employed on the study of the radiation tolerance of the HV-CMOS pixel sensors; obtaining an understanding of the radiation-induced mechanisms responsible for the sensor performance degradation well beyond de current state-of-the-art.
Additionally, Ivan Vila has participated and led several technology transfer projects related with the nuclear civil sector; these activities include the creation of an awarded spin-off company and patents.
Ivan Vila has been principal investigator of more than eight research projects funded by the Spanish science system and the European Union; he is a Guarantor Researcher of the Spanish Excellent Program María de Maeztu, he has published more than 1500 papers on international journals. Ivan Vila has supervised four PhD students. Since 2019, he is serving as head of the Experimental Elementary Particle Physics Group at IFCA.