Research Group
Our group is always looking for talented, creative, hard working new members. Please contact Keith Ulmer if you'd like to discuss possible opportunities to contribute!
Principal Investigator
Keith Ulmer
I joined the faculty at the in the in the fall of 2017. Previously, I was an assistant professor at , and before that was a postdoctoral research associate at the , where I also obtained my Ph.D. in 2007. My undergraduate degree is from . I live with my wife, son, and daughter.
Graduate Students
Noah Zipper
Noah is working on a measurement of the rare B decay ratio Rk, which is a promising channel to discover potential lepton flavor universality violation. He was instrumental in implementing the firmware for the first-ever anomaly detection algorithm, AXOL1TL, in the CMS L1 hardware trigger.Ìý
Natalie Bruhwiler
Natalie is developing a model independent search for physics beyond the standard model utilizing the events from the CMS data set triggered by our anomaly detection algorithm, AXOL1TL.
Jared Fraticelli
Jared is developing firmware to reconstruct the exclusive decay of the W boson to a final state with three pions in the CMS Level 1 trigger. He is also working on a search for an exotic form of dark matter from a dark QCD-like sector resulting in an emerging jets signature. Jared's research is supported by a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship.
Postdoctoral Research Associates
Jannicke Pearkes
Jannicke received her PhD in 2022 from Stanford University with the ATLAS experiment. Now on CMS, she is working on anomaly detection developing and exploring the algorithm used in the CMS Level 1 trigger as well as on physics searches using this unique dataset. She is also an expert in dark sectors, leading searches for physics with emerging jets signatures and having served as the CMS trigger coordinator for the Exotica physics group. She currently serves as convener of the Exotica Jets+X search subgroup.
Stephanie Kwan
Stephanie received her PhD in 2024 from Princeton University. At CU she is working on a search for Higgsinos, the supersymmetric partner of the Higgs boson. The Higgsino may hold the key to resolving the gauge hierarchy problem and avoiding fine tuning for the Higgs mass. She is also developing new algorithms based on charged particle tracks from the Level 1 Trigger, which will be available for the first time starting in Phase 2 of the LHC.
Electronics Engineers
Andrew Hart
Andrew has made many significant contributions to the reconstruction of charged particle tracks in the Level 1 Trigger at CMS for the Phase 2 upgrade. He is also working on the Phase 2 Global Track Trigger system infrastructure and algorithm firmware.
Salvador Ventura Gonzalez
Salvador is working on the Global Track Trigger for the Phase 2 CMS upgrade where he is responsible for coordinating work for the GTT group and integrating new algorithms. He is also working on the infrastructure and integration testing for the charged particle tracking reconstruction at Level 1.
Undergraduate Student Researchers
Our group is always looking to include undergraduate students in research projects. Some recent examples of honors thesis projects from undergraduates in our group include "Tracking Performance Studies Incorporating Machine Learning-Enabled Smartpixels" Ricardo Silvestre (2025), "Test of Lepton Flavor Universality in B+ to K+l+l- decays" Con Muangkod (2025), and "Searches for Rare Light Meson Decays at CMS: Data Scouting Method" Arlee Shelby (2023).Ìý