Professor Freya Blekman

Professor Freya Blekman, a professor in elementary particle physics at the University of Hamburg and Lead Scientist at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY. Her research focuses on trying to answer questions like: how did the universe evolve experimentally? What are the smallest constituents of matter and are they really the smallest? What is the nature of space and time? What, really, is mass?

Professor Blekman is a visiting Professor at CERN and the University of Oxford. At CERN she joined the CMS experiment in 2005 after her PhD which was at the D0 experiment at Fermilab, and worked on the construction and startup of the experiment as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London and Cornell University. Blekman has been doing top quark physics for 20 years and has led many physics and working groups at in CMS, focusing on top quarks, searching for physics beyond the Standard Model using top quarks, and is currently taking the role of Physics Communications Officer in the CMS Collaboration. In CMS, Blekman’s group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel was responsible for the first top quark pair cross section measurement with b-tagging in the l+jets channel, first observation of tW production and multiple searches for BSM including some with long-lived particles.

Freya Blekman completed her doctorate at the Dutch particle physics research centre NIKHEF at the D0 experiment at Fermilab in the USA. She has been involved in the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN for many years and is a well-respected scientist in the CMS collaboration there, having held several leading positions. With her research around the search for new effects beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, she aims to reveal some of the deepest mysteries of our world. Her search, for example for components of Dark Matter, is not limited to research at large accelerators such as the LHC and a possible Future Circular Collider, but she is also looking to connect with the axion research programme and astroparticle physics at DESY.

In addition to her research, Freya Blekman enthusiastically pursues innovative teaching concepts and is also known for communicating her research via social media. On Twitter, she is among the top ten most active female physicists in the world, and in 2016 she received the Outreach Annual Award from the Belgian Academy of Sciences. She is currently the first CMS physics communication officer and is responsible for the communication and outreach of more than 130 scientific papers per year from the more than 3000 international scientists of the CMS collaboration.