Joaquim Matias Espona (Barcelona,1967) is Full Professor at UAB since 2018. He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics in 1995 at UB. He spent five years as postdoctoral researcher at Dipartimento di Fisica Galileo Galilei (1995-1997), SISSA (1997), TH-Division at CERN (1997-1999) under a Marie Curie fellowship and ITP-Aachen (2000). He was also awarded a RyC, I3, Explora and two Spanish Projects (2017,2021) granted as PI. He is regularly appointed to act as Expert Evaluator for the European Commission, SNSF, UK-Research Council, ANR, FWF and ERC. He was Scientific Guarantor of IFAE’s SO, author of 101 publications with h=44 and an average of +150 citations/published paper in the last ten years. He is author of the most cited paper (< 10 authors) in the last five years of the UAB TH-Division. He gave +100 talks, organized 10 conferences and published outreach at IyC, Inference and in public interviews.

Research interests

Uncovering the first properties of the fundamental theory that will supersede the SM of particles constitutes the main goal of his research. He has been a main contributor to the highly successful Flavour Physics program, a field at the forefront of particle physics in the search for New Physics. He is interested in testing the Flavour Precision Frontier that gives us access to energy scales not accessible to direct probes. His research on rare B meson decays is contributing to an exceptionally exciting period concerning what is called “flavor anomalies”. The outcome of his work has pointed out some of the most promising evidences of New Physics found at LHC. Intensive theoretical and experimental work is ongoing to confirm/disprove these indications. He is focused on exploring the limits of the SM to answer the questions left open by this theory using the forthcoming results of the LHCb and Belle II experiments and those of the high-luminosity phase at LHC.

Keywords

Theoretical Particle Physics, Flavour Physics, Rare B decays, New Physics.