Leticia Tarruell is an ICREA Research Professor at ICFO. She studied physics in Madrid and Paris, and obtained her Ph.D. thesis in Quantum Physics in 2008, with a thesis on superfluid Fermi gases carried out at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. As a postdoctoral researcher at the ETH Zurich, she investigated artificial graphene and quantum magnetism with ultracold fermionic atoms in optical lattices. After a stay as Chargé de Recherche CNRS at Institut d’Optique in Bordeaux, she joined ICFO in 2013 and ICREA in 2022. At ICFO, she leads the Ultracold Quantum Gases experimental group. She was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant in 2021 and has been involved in many international projects, including as a PI in the European projects QUIC, DAALI, DYNAMITE and PASQuanS², and as a PI and foreign collaborator in a Research Unit from the German DFG.

Leticia Tarruell leads the Ultracold Quantum Gases experimental group at ICFO, which uses ultracold (nanokelvin) atomic gases as model systems to explore fundamental phenomena in quantum many-body physics. By exploiting atom-light interactions, the group engineers highly controllable artificial quantum materials and probes their properties. The goal is to employ these systems as quantum simulators (i.e. special purpose quantum computers) for studying open problems in various fields of physics, in particular in the condensed-matter context, and for realizing novel quantum phases of matter. This research is carried out in three different platforms: quantum mixtures in the continuum, ground state atoms in optical lattices, and arrays of atoms in Rydberg states.