José Ocariz, the LA-CoNGA physics International Coordinator, is a french-venezuelan experimental particle physicist, senior Professor at Université de Paris and researcher at Institut national de physique nucléaire et physique des particules IN2P3.
He was undergraduate student at Universidad de los Andes, Venezuela and at Abdus Salam’s International Centre for Theoretical Physics ICTP, Trieste. He graduated with a PhD in physics at Université Paris Sud, Orsay, France. He was research fellow at CERN (1999-2000) and junior researcher at CNRS based at SLAC, Stanford (2003-2005).
For several years he studied CP violation, i.e. differences between matter and antimatter. As former member of the NA48, LHCb and BaBar collaborations and the CKMfitter team, he contributed to several experimental results leading to the validation of the CKM Mechanism as source of particle-antiparticle asymmetries in the Standard Model of fundamental interactions.
Since 2009 he is member of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN. He was an active contributor to the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. He is now interested in understanding the properties of the Higgs field, and searches for New Physics beyond the Standard Model.
He has been involved in several programs of international scientific cooperation, in particular between France and Latin America.
He is a staunch frequentist when doing science, and a bayesian when he has to take decisions.