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Thrilled to share that my ERC Advanced Grant project UNICORN “UNlocking the strong Interactions with COllideR Neutrinos” has been awarded. The five-year project will be hosted at the VU Amsterdam and embedded in the Nikhef Theory Group, and will support a team of several PhD candidates postdoctoral researchers starting in late 2026. For 15+ years,…

I tremendously enjoyed Higgs and Effective Field Theories (#HEFT2026) in the wonderful city of Valencia, hosted in the beautiful setting of the Jardí Botànic: the perfect background for a week of intense discussions on effective field theories and the search for physics beyond the Standard Model: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1609241 EFTs give us a powerful, model-independent way to…

Following my talk at the Nikhef (National Institute for Subatomic Physics) Neutrino Platform on Tuesday, today I had the privilege of presenting on the same topic, Physics with TeV Neutrinos and Muons from the LHC, at the PLANCK 2026 & 6th EuCAPT Symposium at CERN https://indico.cern.ch/event/1552644/ a joint conference bringing together the high energy physics…

Can we discover New Physics through Precision at Future Colliders such as CERN’s Future Circular Collider? We can but we need to use a multi-pronged approach, since searching for new physics at the FCC-ee will be very different than at the (HL-)LHC! With the European Strategy for Particle Physics 2026 now concluded and the FCC-ee…

NSBI for Proton Structure: We present a new approach to determine the proton structure at the LHC using Neural Simulation Based Inference (NSBI), moving beyond traditional analyses based on binned observables. Instead of compressing measurements into histograms (and inevitably losing information), we directly exploit the full, high-dimensional structure of collider events. By leveraging AI-driven inference,…

Effective Field Theories such as the SMEFT and HEFT have become an almost unavoidable component of the modern particle physicist’s toolbox. They provide access to New Physics at high scales, beyond the direct reach of particle colliders, by exploiting the subtle quantum effects that connect processes taking place at very different energies. At the LHC,…

I had the pleasure of visiting two great scientific institutions in Abu Dhabi, on a trip that brought together particle physics, astroparticle physics, and quantum science. At Khalifa University I was warmly hosted by the (astro-)particle physics groups of Arjen van Vliet, Rachik Soualah, and colleagues. Although a relative newcomer to high-energy physics, Khalifa University…

This week I had the pleasure of participating in the new edition of the SEARCH 2025 conference at CERN, a stimulating event exploring the discovery potential and breakthroughs of high-energy physics experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider and its High-Luminosity upgrade, with ample time for joint brainstorming and discussion among the participants. As part…

I had a wonderful time at the yearly NNPDF Collaboration meeting, held in the beautiful abbey of Morimondo. It was a stimulating few days discussing recent progress and future plans within the NNPDF framework, ranging from the implementation of new datasets from ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb, to higher-order theoretical calculations and the development of novel…