Rate My Professor Philip Ilten

Philip Ilten is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cincinnati, where he joined as a tenured Assistant Professor in 2020 and was promoted effective August 15, 2023. His research is centered on experimental particle physics phenomenology, focusing on the emergent properties of quantum chromodynamics and potential connections between hidden dark sectors and ordinary matter. As part of the experimental particle physics group, Ilten is actively involved in the LHCb collaboration at CERN. He has served as simulation convener for LHCb since 2017 and as convener of the Higgs working group for the High-Luminosity LHC. Previously, from 2015 to 2017, he convened the soft QCD, electroweak, exotica, and heavy ions physics working group within LHCb, helping to establish its non-B-physics research program. Prior to his position at the University of Cincinnati, Ilten held senior and junior researcher positions at the University of Birmingham from 2017 to 2021.

Ilten has made significant contributions to particle physics software tools essential for simulations and analyses in the field. He is an author of the Pythia 8 event generation software, the creator of the Darkcast recasting package for dark photon searches, and a developer for the HepMC 3 event record. Notable publications include "Serendipity in dark photon searches" (2018), "Dark photons from charm mesons at LHCb" (2015), "Probing QCD with LHCb" (2021), "Forming molecular states with hadronic rescattering" (2022), and contributions to numerous LHCb papers on QCD processes. He is the Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation grant "Discovering True Muonium" (2022–2025, $525,000) and a collaborator on "CSSI: Elements: Machine Learning Quark Hadronization" (2021–2024, $599,989) and "Elements: Automated parametric transformations for rapid particle physics simulations" (2024–2027, $599,872). These projects underscore his influence on advancing theoretical and computational methods for high-energy physics experiments and searches for new phenomena.