ABOUT ANDRÉS
At the age of 10, Andrés got an IBM PC and learned how to program on it. He has always been very enthusiastic about science and technology (he is a fan of Carl Sagan). He studied Physics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, from which he graduated in 2001. His passion for Particle Physics took him to the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom to pursue his career in that field, where he obtained a M.Sc. in 2002 and his Ph.D. in 2006. As part of his research, he worked on the ATLAS experiment at CERN and contributed to the study of physics at a future Linear Collider. After completing his Ph.D., he spent two years at the University of Edinburgh working as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the LHCb experiment, where he contributed to the LHCb’s core software and the development of an Analysis Technique for New Physics searches. He then returned to Colombia, where he joined the Universidad de los Andes as a Postdoctoral Researcher. During his first two years there, Andrés was based at the CERN laboratory, where he worked on the CMS experiment. In particular, he contributed to the commissioning, control and use of a cosmic rays trigger based on the Resistive Plate Chamber detectors and FPGA technology. That is a crucial element in the alignment and calibration of the CMS detector, which has an impact on the precision of the detector and, therefore, on the extraction of valuable results from it. He then returned to Colombia and during the next two years he remained a member of the CMS collaboration while doing research and teaching at the University. In 2013, he worked as a Guest Scientist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois (USA), where he contributed with studies for the Trigger Upgrades to be made to the CMS detector. Having worked on the main experiments (ATLAS and CMS detectors) that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, he had direct contact with the cutting-edge technology used in those detectors. Andrés obtained a university degree in Software Construction at Universidad de los Andes, where he learnt about creation, management, and improvement of software projects. He also studied subjects on software architecture and business architecture. Recently, Andrés was awarded with the opportunity to formally learn about Data Science from a joint effort between MinTIC and Correlation One. He is doing the program DS4A / Colombia. Andrés is very passionate about programming and electronics, and he has made a great impact on every team on which he has worked.
