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New lecturer joins the Cockcroft Institute

Dr Andrea Santamaria Garcia will join the Cockcroft Institute as a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool in early 2025.

Andrea specialises in machine learning applied to particle accelerators, with the aim of improving the performance of existing accelerators and creating a new generation of autonomous ones.

Andrea graduated in Physics from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in 2014 and received her PhD in Accelerator Physics from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2018. She conducted her doctoral studies at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) under a CERN doctoral student scholarship, during which she worked on studying the failure modes of crab cavities, a novel superconducting device that will be key to achieving larger peak luminosities at the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC).

A person with glasses smiling into the camera.
Dr Andrea Santamaria Garcia

Following her PhD, she was awarded a CERN Senior Fellowship and joined the operations group at CERN, where she carried out targeted measurement campaigns and analysis for the LHC Injectors Upgrade project. In 2020, Andrea joined the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where she created and led the AI4Accelerators team at the Institute of Beam Physics and Technology (IBPT). During this time, she coordinated a project focused on controlling ultrafast nonlinear phenomena using online reinforcement learning on hardware. She was also part of several projects focused on the development and deployment of machine learning algorithms in a variety of particle accelerators for tuning and control, including the development of one of the first differentiable beam physics packages. Finally, Andrea co-founded the Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Accelerators (RL4AA) international collaboration, which organises workshops annually on the topic of reinforcement learning.

In her new role, Andrea will tackle the challenge of real-world machine learning algorithm deployment with a focus on reinforcement learning.

Prof Carsten P Welsch, Head of Accelerator Science at the University of Liverpool, said: “We are delighted to welcome Andrea as lecturer in our cluster. Her research is a perfect fit to our strategic priorities and the long-term plans of the Cockcroft Institute.”

Prof Stewart Boogert, Director of the Cockcroft Institute, added: “Artificial intelligence and machine learning is a transformative capability for almost all aspect of science and technology, including particle accelerators which are complex and often unwieldy systems. Artificial intelligence can play a significant role in improving the performance, reliability and operability of future accelerators. We are delighted that Dr  Andrea Santamaria Garcia will be joining us in the new year, bringing her experience and skills to the Cockcroft Institute.”