Career Bio

Michael Staelens, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Instituto de Física Corpuscular in Paterna (Valencia), Spain, working on high-energy physics phenomenology research for the MoEDAL-MAPP experiment at the Large Hadron Collider and future colliders such as the International Linear Collider. My doctoral research, which began at the start of 2017, was largely focused on novel studies of various scenarios of new physics beyond the Standard Model that are of interest to a recently approved experiment located at the Large Hadron Collider, namely, the MAPP experiment. My research career started a couple of years before this through a summer student researcher position that I received in 2015 while I was still working on my undergraduate degree, and I have been consistently working on physics-related research since then. During this time, I have published a variety of peer-reviewed scientific articles in numerous high-impact scientific journals and released several conference proceedings and reports.

Awards

I received several noteworthy accolades throughout my graduate studies: a Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award—from a total of seven GSTA awards granted in 2021 by the Graduate Students' Association of the University of Alberta—and the Best Student Oral Presentation Award (Third Prize in the Particle Physics Division), received at the 2020 edition of the annual Canadian Association of Physicists Congress.

2021—Graduate Student TA Award

2020—CAP-PPD Divisional Best Student Oral               Presentation Award (3rd)

2019—UAlberta GSA Travel Grant

2016—AIHS Summer Studentship

2015, 2016—Jason Lang Scholarship

Awards

I received several noteworthy accolades throughout my graduate studies: a Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award—from a total of seven GSTA awards granted in 2021 by the Graduate Students' Association of the University of Alberta—and the Best Student Oral Presentation Award (Third Prize in the Particle Physics Division), received at the 2020 edition of the annual Canadian Association of Physicists Congress.