Edgar Carrera
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I am a postdoc working with the CMS group at Boston University. I am currently based at CERN because it allows me to be directly involved in operating the detector, something that I enjoy a lot: I serve as HLT (high-level trigger) expert for the trigger studies group. I am also part of the Exotica physics group, where I am involved in some analyses that search for new phenomena.
I was born in the volcanic highlands (2850 m) of Quito, Ecuador. After graduating from my high school, Colegio Marista, in 1997, I spent almost a year in Modesto, California as an exchange student at Davis High School, where I made very good friends and also learned some English.
Back in Ecuador, in the fall of 1998, I entered the National Politechnic School in Quito, which is the best university in my home country. There, I majored in physics and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in the spring of 2004. My undergrad work was, for the most part, related to condensed matter physics. Even though this was an interesting and fun topic, it was not related with what I really wanted to do: particle physics.
In July of 2003 I had the opportunity to go to Trieste, Italy, for one of their Summer Schools in Particle Physics at the International Center for Theoretical Physics. It was a great experience and it enhanced my interest for this field. So I moved to Tallahasse, Florida in the fall of 2004 to study at Florida State University and to join, one year later, the high-energy physics group. I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation in December 2008 working for the DØ experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron and joined the CMS group at Boston University in April 2009.
