BIO

Dr. Michel Sorel is a CSIC Staff Scientist at IFIC (Valencia, Spain) since 2017. He is IFIC's Deputy Director since 2019. Dr. Sorel co-leads (together with Dr. A. Cervera) the Experimental Neutrino Physics research line at IFIC. His current research focus is on neutrino physics with particle accelerators and on neutrinoless double beta decay. He presently collaborates in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE, USA) and in the Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC (NEXT, Spain). At present, Dr. Sorel is the DUNE Phase II Deputy Coordinator and the NEXT Physics Coordinator. During his tenure-track years (CSIC Ramón y Cajal fellow, 2008-2016), he also participated in the T2K neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan. As a post-doctoral researcher at IFIC (Marie Curie EIF Fellow at U. of Valencia and CSIC JAE-DOC Fellow, 2005-2008), he worked on a number of neutrino experiments at particle accelerators around the world: SciBooNE and MiniBooNE in the USA, K2K in Japan, and HARP in Switzerland. He made key contributions to the confirmation, in K2K, of atmospheric neutrino oscillations with an accelerator-based neutrino beam (Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2016). Dr. Sorel earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University (USA) in 2005. His dissertation research was on the MiniBooNE neutrino oscillation experiment at Fermilab and on sterile neutrino phenomenology, with advisor Professor Janet Conrad. He earned his Laurea Degree in Physics from Bologna University (Italy) in 1998, where he studied ultra- high-energy cosmic rays. Michel is married to Olga Mena, a theoretical physicist. They are the parents of two children, Sofia and Nicolas.