Michelangelo Traina

About

I am an experimental physicist investigating the nature of Dark Matter. I obtained my bachelor degree in Physics (Laurea Triennale in Fisica) at Università degli Studi di Catania, in Italy. I was then awarded an EACEA scholarship to undertake the NucPhys Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Nuclear Physics in France, at Université de Caen Normandie, Italy, at Università degli Studi di Padova, and Spain, at a consortium of universities including Universitat de Barcelona, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de Salamanca, and Universidad de Sevilla. After obtaining my master degree, I started doctoral studies at Sorbonne Université, in Paris, France, where I worked on the direct detection of Dark Matter with Charge-Coupled Devices with the DAMIC at SNOLAB and DAMIC-M experiments. I successfully obtained my PhD in October 2022. After a transition period of two months as a postdoc at LPNHE, Paris, I moved to the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, United States, where I was employed as a postdoctoral scholar to continue working on DAMIC and on the SELENA CMOS experiment. During my time at UW, I have coordinated the packaging and testing activities of the DAMIC-M CCD modules on-site. These sensors will be installed in the DAMIC-M experiment at the Modane underground laboratory (LSM), in France. Besides the expertise required in semiconductor device handling, this activity is characterized by strict radio-purity requirements to achieve ultra-low radioactive backgrounds of detector parts. I also managed the operations of the DAMIC detector at the SNOLAB, the deepest cleanest underground laboratory in the world, located in Sudbury, Canada. I recently moved to Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Santander, Spain to focus on the DAMIC-M detector deployment, which will happen in early 2026.