Petra Merkel

Senior Scientist

Telephone: (630) 840-2119 E-mail: petra@fnal.gov Office Location: WH11W

Biography

I received my PhD in 1999 from the University of Hamburg researching heavy vector bosons with the H1 experiment at HERA. Then I worked as a Fermilab postdoc on the CDF experiment at the Tevatron, contributing to the silicon detector construction and operation as well as high-pt dilepton analyses. This was followed by a move to Purdue University and the CMS experiment as a senior research scientist, where I played a leading role in the CMS forward pixel detector construction, as well as its commissioning and operation at CERN. During that time I started being involved in Higgs physics, specializing on high-mass searches for additional Higgs bosons. Subsequently, I have been in charge of the Pixel DQM and Tracker DPG groups, part of the Phase 1 upgrade of the forward pixel detector, and now I am the Level 2 manager of the Outer Tracker upgrade for HL-LHC.

My time outside of CMS is spent in coordinating Detector R&D at Fermilab, as well as nationally and internationally, in my roles as Fermilab Detector R&D Coordinator, Snowmass Instrumentation Frontier co-convener, CPAD co-convener and ICFA IID panel member.