Kevin J. Pedro — Research

As a scientist, my current major responsibilities are:

Searching for evidence of strongly-coupled dark matter from hidden sectors in the forms of semivisible jets, emerging jets, and soft unclustered energy patterns.
L2 Simulation Convener: coordinating CMS simulation for detector, geometry, and electronics.
Developing SONIC (Services for Optimized Network Inference on Coprocessors) for CMS and other experiments (ATLAS, DUNE, IceCube, LIGO).

Previous or minor responsibilities:

L3 Machine Learning for Simulation (ML4Sim) Convener: organizing projects to use machine learning for detector simulation.
Developing graph neural networks for fast and accurate clustering with the High Granularity Calorimeter.
L2 Offline/Computing Upgrade Software Coordinator and Deputy Release Manager: reviewing code, managing workflows and needs of various subdetector groups, integrating pull requests and building releases.
Searching for supersymmetry via production of gluinos and squarks with hadronic final states in the 13 TeV data from the LHC. The latest result, using the full Run 2 dataset, is available at arxiv:1908.04722.
L3 HCAL CMSSW Co-convener: coordinating HCAL software and simulation needs, focusing on the Phase 1 upgrades.
Developing reconstruction algorithms and software for the High Granularity Calorimeter, focusing on computing performance.
Supervising studies of the effects of endcap calorimeter radiation damage on physics performance.

Curriculum vitae: PDF, LaTeX
This uses the LaTeX resume class res.cls. Merged .tex files were generated with flatex.

My CV only lists publications to which I contributed directly. Because the CMS experiment is a collaboration consisting of several thousand scientists and engineers, all publications are authored by the collaboration. Authorship for individual members is based on a certain minimum threshold of contributions to the experiment. My name appears on many papers to which I contributed indirectly, e.g. by developing commonly-used software or taking shifts in detector operations. A complete list of my publications can be found on

INSPIRE.

Here are a few recent highlights from my research:

I was promoted to Scientist (permanent) in December 2024.

I was awarded a Department of Energy Early Career Research Grant in October 2024.

I received the Universities Research Association Honorary Early Career Award in July 2024.

I led the largest-ever "HEP Takes the Hill" advocacy trip to Washington, D.C. in April 2024.

I was invited to give several plenary presentations:

"AI and Beyond: New Techniques for Simulation and Design in HEP" at the Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics conference in May 2023;
"Machine Learning for Particle Physics Experiments" at the ML4Jets conference in November 2023;
"Evolution of Generation and Simulation Techniques in the AI/ML Era" at the APS April Meeting in April 2024;
"Dark QCD: the Next Frontier in Dark Matter" at the Mitchell Conference in May 2024.

I was promoted to Associate Scientist (tenure-track equivalent) in September 2019.

To the left, I am pictured standing in front of the CMS experiment. The background for this site is a

Higgs boson candidate event, showing a decay to two Z bosons, where one Z boson decays to two electrons and the other Z boson decays to two muons.