Rate My Professor Marina Petri

Professor Marina Petri is an experimental nuclear physicist in the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology at the University of York. Her research centres on the structure of exotic nuclei, involving cutting-edge experiments at leading international accelerator laboratories to investigate the nature of the nuclear force, whether nuclei can be understood from underlying fundamental interactions, the role of three-body forces, and how nucleon-nucleon correlations deplete single-particle strength in atomic nuclei. She develops next-generation detectors, tools, and techniques to support these efforts. Petri earned her PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Liverpool between 2004 and 2008, and her undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. Her international career includes postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA, followed by an appointment as Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany from 2012 to 2016. In 2016, she joined the University of York as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, benefiting from a proleptic appointment that enabled her advancement through roles including Lecturer in Nuclear Physics, Senior Research Fellow, and Professor.

Petri serves as Principal Investigator on the STFC-funded gRIBF-UK project to develop a scintillator-based high-resolution gamma-ray spectrometer at RIBF, and as Co-Investigator on the Nuclear Physics Consolidated Grant 2024-2027. In December 2025, she was elected spokesperson for the R3B collaboration at FAIR. She guest-edited the 2024 theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A titled 'The liminal position of Nuclear Physics: from hadrons to neutron stars,' contributing the lead article. With 110 research outputs, her contributions cover topics such as quasi-free scattering, fusion reactions, high-precision mass measurements of proton-rich isotopes, and fission yields. Key publications include 'Fusion of 12C+28Si at deep sub-barrier energies' (Physics Letters B, 2026), 'High-Precision Mass Measurements of Proton-Rich Rh, Pd, Cd isotopes in the vicinity of 100Sn and Impact on X-Ray Burst and Supernova Nucleosynthesis' (2026), and 'Establishing the 40Ca(p,pα) reaction at 392 MeV under quasi-free scattering conditions' (2026). An invited speaker at events like the Nuclear Physics Forum, Euroschool on Exotic Beams, and Nuclear Physics for the Next Generation, she maintains collaborations across America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and accepts PhD students.