Dr. Claudia Ratti is an associate professor at the Physics Department of the University of Houston. In light of her achievements she has been awarded the ‘2011 International Zonta Prize for Women in Science’, the ‘2012 Prize Giuseppe Borgia’ granted by the Italian Academy of Science (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei), the NSF Career Award in 2017 and the University of Houston Research Excellence award in 2019. Her research is mainly focused on the study of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density, such as the one created at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL. She is currently finishing her manuscript for a new volume, The Deconfinement Transition of QCD: Theory meets Experiment, which to be published in Springer's book series, Lecture Notes in Physics.
Why did you become a scientist?
I became a scientist because, from a very young age, I was always passionate about numbers and calculations. Besides, I was very curious about natural sciences and finding out how things work and why. At the end of high school it was pretty obvious to me that I will pursue a scientific career. I picked physics because it is the most fundamental science, the one which explains the laws of nature.
Could you briefly describe your research interests, or current project?
My research is in fundamental theoretical physics. I study a phase of matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma, which permeated our Universe just a few microseconds after the Big Bang, and which today is created in the largest machine ever built: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I solve the fundamental theory that describes the interaction between quarks and gluons, the basic building blocks of nature, by means of numerical simulations on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
What does being a woman in STEM mean to you?
Being a woman in STEM to me represents a unique possibility to act as a role model and inspire young girls, who are as curious as I was about natural sciences, to become physicists like me. Recently I really understood the importance of this aspect, as many female undergraduate and graduate students ask to join my group, or reach out to me to ask for advice or just share with me some gender-related issues that they may have encountered in their work.
Articles published in Springer journals:
- Higher order fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges from lattice QCD, Journal of High Energy Physics
- QCD equation of state at nonzero chemical potential: continuum results with physical quark masses at order μ 2, Journal of High Energy Physics
- Fluctuations of conserved charges at finite temperature from lattice QCD, Journal of High Energy Physics
- The QCD equation of state with dynamical quarks, Journal of High Energy Physics
- Is there still any T c mystery in lattice QCD? Results with physical masses in the continuum limit III, Journal of High Energy Physics
- Impact of resonance regeneration and decay on the net proton fluctuations in a hadron resonance gas, The European Physical Journal C
Dr. Claudia Ratti received her Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Torino (Italy) in 2003. She has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich (Germany), ECT* in Trento (Italy), State University of New York at Stony Brook (USA) and Wuppertal University (Germany). In 2010 she became assistant professor and group leader at Torino University, thanks to a FIRB grant funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. In 2014 she became an assistant professor at the Physics Department of the University of Houston. Since 2017 she is a tenured associate professor. Author of more than sixty publications in peer-reviewed international journals, she presented the results of her research in more than a hundred seminars at international conferences and universities. In light of her achievements she has been awarded the ‘2011 International Zonta Prize for Women in Science’, the ‘2012 Prize Giuseppe Borgia’ granted by the Italian Academy of Science (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei), the NSF Career Award in 2017 and the University of Houston Research Excellence award in 2019. Her research is mainly focused on the study of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density, such as the one created at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL.
