Cigdem Issever is lead scientist at DESY, a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and visiting professor at the University of Oxford. She is head of the Particle Physics Group at DESY Zeuthen and the Experimental High Energy Physics Group at Humboldt University of Berlin. 

Her current research at DESY focuses on searches for Dark Matter signatures in collision events at the LHC that contain Higgs bosons which decay into a pair of b-quarks. She is also preparing Higgs property measurements using the same final states and is interested in measurements to understand the non-collision backgrounds in ATLAS as well as in ATLAS measurements that will improve the understanding of cosmic-ray induced air showers in the earth’s atmosphere. 

Issever is an expert in the reconstruction and calibration of so-called “jets”. Jets are particle showers that are initiated by quarks or gluons in the detector. Her current research focuses on the identification of Higgs bosons that decay into b-jets. She is focusing on improving the experimental techniques in reconstructing these objects by using for example machine learning techniques, improving the jet reconstruction and b-quark identification. 

Her interest in jets started as a diploma student at DESY when she was tasked with to develop a compensation algorithm for the H1 calorimeter to improve the energy reconstruction of jets. This algorithm is one of the algorithms that are used today in the ATLAS experiment to reconstruct the jet energies. After her PhD she became a member of the CDF experiment at FNAL before joining the ATLAS experiment and starting as a departmental lecturer at the University of Oxford. Her research shifted from measurements to searches for new physics at the LHC in jet final states: e.g. microscopic black holes, extra dimensions and new heavy particles. 

She is also interested to use quantum technologies for improving the particle identification in high energy physics experiments and designing new non-collider based experiments to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Beside her research interest, Issever is also keen on outreach and communicating her science to the wider public. In collaboration with schools and particle physics colleagues she founded the ATLAScraft project where the CERN, the LHC and the ATLAS experiment can be explored in the online game Minecraft. 

Academic career

Memberships