Scott Demarest
Bio
I am advised by Prof. Souvik Das and use data from the CMS experiment at CERN to search for exotic Higgs boson decays that produce dark-sector particles. These hypothetical particles can decay into muons and tau leptons, but the tau decays include invisible neutrinos, making the events challenging to reconstruct. My work focuses on developing new kinematic reconstruction techniques that recover this lost information and improve sensitivity to such dark matter signals. I also contribute to the CMS detector upgrade by developing quality-assurance software for the next-generation silicon tracking modules.
I grew up in New York and initially came to FIT to study aerospace engineering, but discovered my passion for physics partway through my undergraduate degree. I switched majors and am now pursuing my PhD in physics, where I focus on particle physics and detector development.
