Elisa is Assistant Professor at the Kavli IPMU. Until 2024 she was also a professor at the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo. She was an undergraduate and Master student at USP and received her PhD from McGill University. She was a Serrapilheira Institute grantee from 2021 to 2025.
Elisa's field of research is in the interface between cosmology, astrophysics, and high energy physics. Her work focuses mostly on studying the dark sector. She is mostly worried about dark matter, focusing on ultra-light dark matter. She is also interested in the late expansion of the universe, studying the phenomenology of dark energy, as well as several topics in early universe cosmology, including the initial singularity, the early evolution of the universe, and reheating. Testing those models using the current observational probes and new observational windows is also part of her research.
Olcyr Sumensari is a CNRS Researcher affiliated with IJCLab (Laboratoire de Physique des 2 Infinis “Irène Joliot-Curie”, in Orsay, France), working in theoretical high-energy physics. His research centers on flavor physics—phenomena involving different “flavors” of quarks and leptons and their potential to reveal physics beyond the Standard Model. He investigates new-physics scenarios using both effective field theory and explicit models, such as those with extended scalar sectors or leptoquarks. His work examines rare processes, lepton-flavor violation, and possible connections to dark matter and other extensions of fundamental interactions.
By developing precise theoretical predictions testable in current and future experiments, he works at the interface of theory and phenomenology. Flavor physics is one of the most sensitive probes of new physics, where even small deviations from Standard Model expectations may indicate new particles or interactions. Through studies of heavy flavor, lepton flavor, and rare decays, his research identifies promising avenues for discovery in upcoming experimental programs.
Pedro Machado currently works at Fermilab (Theoretical Physics Division, U.S.), as a researcher focused on neutrinos and beyond-Standard-Model physics.
He search for physics beyond the Standard Model that could manifest in the neutrino sector. He investigates non-standard neutrino interactions —possible new forces or particles that might subtly modify how neutrinos propagate and oscillate, extending or challenging the conventional three-neutrino framework.
By developing detailed phenomenological predictions for current and next-generation neutrino experiments, he explores how signatures of new physics could appear in data and how experimental measurements can be used to uncover or tightly constrain such effects. His work helps chart the path toward discovering new interactions through one of the most elusive sectors of particle physics.
