Marina Petri

Marina is a nuclear physicist who was born in Greece but built her research career across Greece, the UK, the USA and Germany before returning to the UK in 2016 to take up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of York. Marina studies the structure of the atomic nuclei, i.e. how protons and neutrons arrange themselves and how they interact among each other to form complex nuclei, which has a decisive impact on everyday life, from the very existence of carbon-based life on Earth to critical nuclear physics applications such as carbon dating. Our understanding of nuclear structure is still elusive and relies on sophisticated experiments that deliver critical observables of atomic nuclei. For example, Marina’s experiments use particle accelerators that smash nuclei traveling at up to 50% the speed of light on stationary material to induce nuclear reactions. Typically, fewer than one in a million reactions will create the nucleus under study and she measures the time it lives in a specific state, about a billionth of a second.