Invited Speakers

Yasmine Amhis
Yasmine Sara Amhis is an experimental particle physicist studying b hadrons with the LHCb experiment at CERN. She initially left her home country Algeria to study medical sciences in Orsay, France, but soon discovered her passion for physics and changed subjects. In 2009, Yasmine obtained a PhD at the University Paris-Sud in Orsay with a study on B meson decays. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, she received a permanent position with CNRS at LAL (now IJCLab) Orsay in 2012. In 2016, she was awarded the Jacques Herbrand Prize for young researchers in physics from the French Academy of Science. With works on b baryon properties, she obtained the Habilitation à diriger des recherches at Université Paris-Saclay in 2020. She was elected Physics Coordinator of the LHCb experiment from 2022 to 2024. In addition, Yasmine is involved in the African Strategy for Fundamental and Applied Physics where she coordinated the group on (astro)particle physics until 2022.

More information about Yasmine Amhis can be found on her webpage: https://www.yasmineamhis.com/

Dmitry Budker
Born in the former USSR, Dmitry Budker was a student at the Novosibirsk State University from 1980 until 1985, when he received an equivalent to MS with honors from the Department of Physics. He then served as a junior researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, where he conducted research on laser spectroscopy of atoms. Dmitry Budker received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1993 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley until his faculty appointment in 1995.  He is currently Professor of Graduate School at UC Berkeley, and since 2014 he also holds a Professorship and section leader position at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz, in Germany.  Broadly, his field of research is experimental atomic physics, with the focus on testing fundamental symmetries of nature in experiments that utilize the methods of atomic, molecular, and optical physics. He is a recipient of the Norman F. Ramsey Prize of the American Physical Society and a co-recipient of the Erwin-Schrödinger Prize for developing new techniques in magnetic resonance.

More information about Dmitry Budker’s research can be found here: http://budker.berkeley.edu/index.html,   https://budker.uni-mainz.de/

Enrico Pajer
Professor Enrico Pajer is a theoretical physicist at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge, who has made several influential contributions to theoretical cosmology, quantum field theory in curved spacetime, and gravity. Since 2018, he has advanced from Lecturer to Professor at Cambridge, following his tenure as an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. His academic journey includes stints as a Research Associate at Princeton University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. He earned his PhD summa cum laude from Ludwig Maximilian University, studying under Professors Dieter Luest and Michael Haack. Throughout his career, he has received prestigious awards, such as the EPSRC New Horizon Fellowship and the VIDI NWO Fellowship. He has been active in academic governance, serving on the Board of UK Cosmology, being a representative of the London Mathematical Society and the Utrecht Young Academy and coordinating the Master's program in Theoretical Physics at Utrecht. Additionally, Professor Pajer has organized numerous conferences and workshops, including the Cosmological Correlator annual series since 2020. His research and organizational contributions significantly shape the fields of cosmology and theoretical physics worldwide.

More information about Enrico Pajer’s research can be found here: https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/ep551/bio.html