Philip Harris

Biography

Philip Harris joined the MIT faculty in 2017. Born in Sao Paulo, he received his B.S in Physics from Caltech in 2005, and his Ph.D from MIT in 2011 on research performed at CERN with the CMS experiment. From 2011-2013, Philip was a CERN fellow working on the Higgs discovery. From 2014-2017, he was a CERN staff scientist working on the CMS experiment.

Research Interest

"The highest energy collisions in a lab are created with the LHC. While we have recorded many PetaBytes of data, we still do not understand the finer features of these collisions. Hidden within the details may be the imprints of new physics, and Philip Harris' research seeks to reveal a deeper understanding of LHC data. Currently, Philip is working on the search for dark matter. By developing a suite of collider searches which probe dark matter at the highest energies, he has performed some of the most precise measurements of the production of heavy light-like particles, the electroweak bosons. His work complements more conventional dark matter satellite and direct detection experiments providing a new angle of constraints. Much of Philip's research exploits new techniques to resolve the structure of quark and gluon decays, known as jet substructure. Additionally, Philip is currently working on a new approach to perform pattern recognition at MHz collision rate as part of the upgrade to the CMS triggering system. Philip maintains an interest in jet substructure measurements in the quark gluon medium of heavy ion collisions, along an interest in machine learning techniques."