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INFN Bruno Touschek Award
2024
WINNER
Simone Mazza
University of California Santa Cruz
Dr. Simone Mazza is awarded the INFN Bruno Toushek Award for his significant contributions to the development and applications of Low-Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs) for detector instrumentation, from the High Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD) for the ATLAS experiment, to leading key elements of the PIONEER experiment at PSI. His contributions have been recognized with a US Patent and are reaching across several important areas of particle physics such as the LHC and the EIC and could stretch to medical and industrial applications.
Dr. Michele Mazza is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). His current physics research plan is mainly focused on the study of lepton flavor universality by the observation of rare pion decays, he is very involved in an emerging pion decay experiment, the PIONEER experiment, that will run at the PiE-5 pion beam line at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI). For PIONEER, he is developing the high granularity active target (ATAR). he is also very interested in the physics at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) that is going to be built at Brookhaven national Laboratories (BNL). For the EPIC detector at EIC he is leading on the silicon sensor development for the timing layer at UCSC. His expertise is silicon sensors and, in particular, ultra-fast silicon sensors known as low gain avalanche detectors (LGADs) that allow a timing resolution per hit down to 20 ps. He has been organizing the Cal-bridge mentoring program for a few years and he is currently in the PIONEER DEI committee. In his free time, he loves surfing and mountain biking in the beautiful Santa Cruz county.