| Nationality: | Moroccan-Swiss |
| Fields: | Physics |
| Workplaces: | Drew University Towson University Loyola University Maryland University of Geneva University of Regina Columbia University Cornell University University of Montreal Syracuse University University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Professor Claude Joseph |
| Awards: | Person of Extraordinary Ability in Science and Education by the US Government, also known as genius visa (2020) High Energy and Particle Physics Prize for an outstanding contribution to High Energy Physics (as a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN) (2013) Nominee for the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowships by the University of Regina (2009) |
Kamal Benslama is a Moroccan-Swiss experimental particle physicist. He is a professor of physics at Drew University, a visiting experimental scientist at Fermilab, and a guest scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory . He worked on the ATLAS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, which is considered the largest experiment in the history of physical science. At present, he is member of the MU2E collaboration at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago. Fermilab is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.
Originally from Morocco, Kamal Benslama studied physics at Geneva University. He obtained a bachelor and a master's degree in high-energy physics from Geneva University. In 1993, he started a PhD at the department of High Energy Physics at the University of Lausanne (this department is now part of the EPFL since 2003) and obtained his PhD from the same university in 1998.
In 1999, Benslama moved to North America. He worked as a post-doc on the CLEO experiment at Cornell University in the US, then he became a research scientist at Columbia University in New York and associate scientist on the ATLAS experiment at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. from 2006 to 2012, he was a professor of physics at the University of Regina in Canada. During this time, Benslama founded and led [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] an international research group in experimental high-energy physics. He worked on the ATLAS experiment at CERN where he was a principal investigator and a team leader. He also was a member of the international ATLAS collaboration board and a member of the Liquid Argon representative board.
Benslama started his research activities at CERN in 1992, he first worked on ATLAS, then on NOMAD, (Neutrino Oscillation search with a MAgnetic Detector) which was designed to search for neutrino oscillation. His thesis was on the construction, installation and simulation of a preshower particle detector as well as on data analysis using data from the NOMAD experiment.[8]
He contributed to many aspects of the ATLAS experiment. He worked on a readout system for a silicon detector for the ATLAS experiment, then he worked on the Liquid Argon Calorimeter, the High Level Trigger and Data Quality and Monitoring. He also led several efforts on searches for physics beyond the standard model at the LHC,[9] [10] in particular searches for doubly charged higgs, extra-dimensions and leptoquarks. He was heavily involved in the exotics physics program at the LHC.
Kamal Benslama has three children [11] and lives in New Jersey.[12] [13]