Rate My Professor Francesca di Lodovico

Professor Francesca Di Lodovico is Professor of Particle Physics in the Department of Physics at King’s College London, where she established and heads the Experimental Particle & Astroparticle Physics (EPAP) group since 2019. She graduated from the University La Sapienza, Rome, and earned her PhD at ETH Zurich working on Higgs boson and supersymmetric particle searches at the LEP-2 experiment. Her postdoctoral research focused on b-physics at the BaBar experiment at SLAC, first at the University of Edinburgh and then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2004, she was awarded a lectureship at Queen Mary University of London, where she founded a neutrino physics group, secured a professorship within eight years, and served as head of the Particle Physics Research Centre. Her research centers on experimental particle and astroparticle physics, particularly neutrino physics, probing major questions like the matter-antimatter asymmetry via CP violation in neutrino oscillations, neutrino cross-sections and interactions, astrophysical neutrinos from supernovae, and proton decay. She has contributed significantly to experiments such as T2K, Super-Kamiokande, and Hyper-Kamiokande, for which she is international project leader and spokesperson, re-elected in 2023. She also serves on the Near Detector Steering Committee for T2K.

Professor Di Lodovico’s contributions include key roles in discoveries of reactor antineutrinos and advancements linking to Big Bang physics insights. Her publications feature "First Differential Measurement of the Single π+ Production Cross Section in Neutrino Neutral-Current Scattering" (Physical Review Letters, 2025) and "Experimental Considerations in Long-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Measurements" (Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, 2023), with over 7,000 citations. Awards encompass the 2007 ERC Starting Grant for T2K, 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and 2025 Giuseppe Occhialini Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for neutrino physics contributions, oscillation parameters, and leadership in long-baseline experiments. She received further Institute of Physics recognition for groundbreaking physics work.