Ana Amélia Bergamini Machado

She holds a degree in Physics Education from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR, 1997), a degree in Physics from UFPR (1998), a master's in Physics also from UFPR (2001), and a Ph.D. in Physics from the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF, 2007). She began her scientific career working on field theory and studying models beyond the Standard Model. During her Ph.D., she worked in high-energy physics, analyzing data from charmed decays in the FOCUS-E831 experiment, and participated in the production of the experimental setup for testing and validating components used in the readout electronics of the LHCb muon detector.During her postdoctoral period, she shifted to experimental neutrino physics, working at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy and the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. During this period, she contributed to the LVD (supernova neutrino detection), GERDA (double beta decay), and Dark Side (dark matter) experiments. After returning to Brazil, she joined the LArIAT, SBND, and DUNE experiments.She is the co-inventor of ARAPUCA, a scintillation light collection device resulting from the interaction between neutrinos and argon atoms. ARAPUCA has become the photon detection system for DUNE and is also part of the photon detection system for SBND. She received the APS (American Physical Society) award for the co-invention of ARAPUCA.Currently, she is a young researcher at FAPESP, working at the UNICAMP, where she develops and improves ARAPUCA, both for liquid argon scintillation light and for Cherenkov light in water. She has experience in the field of Particle Physics, with an emphasis on detectors, scientific instrumentation for particle physics, liquid argon detectors, plastic scintillators, Cherenkov in water, neutrino physics, dark matter, Geant4 simulation, optics, materials, and cryogenics. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)