Department of Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student Christopher "Eddie" McGrady has been named a Meenakshi Narain Graduate Scholar at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Physics Center (LPC) for 2025. This program is aimed to support exceptional graduate students from the U.S. Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) institutions. It will fund Eddie to spend a year resident at the Fermilab LPC benefiting from the mentorship of resident LPC scientists.
At the LPC in 2025, McGrady will look for new physics in fully-leptonic decays of top quark pairs and a top quark produced with a W-boson using the framework of standard model effective field theory (SMEFT). In particular, McGrady plans to use simulation based inference techniques, which have shown to be effective for high-dimensional, precision-driven analyses across various academic disciplines. A full description of his project can be found here.
“I congratulate Eddie on being named as one of only two Meenakshi Narain Graduate Scholars for 2025. Remarkably, this is the second year in a row that a ND graduate student has won one of these scholarships! This is a reflection of our strong high energy physics group," said department chair Professor Morten Eskildsen.
In 2023, the LPC Graduate Scholars program was renamed in honor of the late Professor Meenakshi Narain who fought for and attained the funds for this program when she was LPC co-coordinator. The LPC serves primarily as a resource and physics analysis hub for several hundred physicists at U.S. institutions in the CMS collaboration. The LPC offers a vibrant community of CMS scientists from U.S. and overseas institutions that play leading roles in analysis of data, in the definition and refinement of physics objects, in detector commissioning and operations, and in the design, development, and construction of the detector upgrade. There is close and frequent collaboration with the Fermilab theory community.
McGrady is advised by Professor Kevin Lannon.