Gillian Kopp
Pappalardo Fellow In Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolGillian Kopp is an experimental particle physicist and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT with 11 years’ experience designing detector hardware and searching for physics beyond the Standard Model on the CMS experiment at CERN. She has led development and deployment of novel hardware triggers for long-lived particle signatures, improving the hadron calorimeter’s timing and depth-based trigger primitives used in CMS offline software. At Princeton she combined hands-on operations, beam tests for precision timing detectors, and large-scale data analysis implemented in C++ and Python to extract rare signals from complex datasets. Her contributions to the widely used cms-sw/cmssw codebase include critical HCAL trigger primitive algorithm changes that enable accurate LLP triggering in the uHTR era. Based in Cambridge, MA, she pairs deep detector expertise with collaborative leadership as a DPG co-convener and a history of rapid operational response during data taking. Colleagues value her ability to translate low-level electronics and firmware details into analysis-level sensitivity gains.
11 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
California Institute of TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Particle physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Particle physics at Princeton University
Github Skills (8)
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
cms9
cer9
algorithms8
data-structures8
algorithm8
data-structure8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
cms-sw/cmssw
Jul 2021 - Aug 2022
CMS Offline Software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 20 commits, 12 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Gillian primarily contributed to the development and modification of HCAL trigger primitive algorithms within the CMS offline software repository. Their work involved implementing and refining fine-grain bit calculations, including those related to timing and depth information for the LLP trigger. Code changes included the addition of new features, adaptation to uHTR group0 LUT bits, and corrections to ensure the correct behavior of these bits within the HCAL trigger system. These modifications are essential for accurate data processing in the CMS experiment.
cmshepcerncms-experimentc-plus-plus
gk199/Run3-HCAL-LLP-Analysis
Jan 2023 - Jul 2026
Run 3 HCAL LLP analysis
Contributions:5 releases, 37 PRs, 328 pushes in 3 years 5 months
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