Dr. Valentina Vecchio

Biography

Valentina Vecchio is a particle physicist with a strong passion for uncovering the fundamental building blocks of the universe. She joined the University of Manchester in November 2019 as a Research Associate, focusing on precision measurements of Higgs boson properties using the ATLAS detector at CERN. Valentina designed and led an ATLAS measurement related to the associated production of the Higgs boson with a single top quark. Her work highlights an interesting deviation of the measured cross-section versus theoretical predictions, with a significance level of 2.8, indicating the need for further investigation. Additionally, she has dedicated significant effort to the identification of heavy-flavoured jets and the evaluation of performance under collision data. Currently, she is leading a team that developed a transformer-based algorithm significantly improving heavy-flavour identification performance at the ATLAS detector. Her findings have been submitted to Nature Communications. Valentina holds a Ph.D. where her thesis introduced a novel method for extracting top-quark couplings to bottom-quarks and included important measurements related to heavy-flavour tagging performance. She has also interned at Fermilab, developing new optimization methods for electron selection in W-asymmetry measurements.

Research Interests

Experience