Carla Faria

Professor Carla Figueira de Morisson Faria was born in Belem (Amazon Delta). She completed her MSci in Physics at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1994, and earned her PhD in 1999 at the Max Born Institute, Berlin/Technical University of Berlin, Germany, on strong-field and attosecond physics. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden (1999-2001), the MBI-Berlin (2002-2003), the Technical University Vienna (2002) and the University of Hanover (2003-2004). In 2005, she moved to the UK as a University Research Fellow at the Department of Mathematics, City, University of London, where she became a Lecturer in 2006. Thereafter, in 2007, she took up a lectureship at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London (UCL), where she initiated and leads a research group. Her research students have established careers that draw upon their research skills, and have been awarded 20 prizes at local, national, and international levels. In 2013, she was promoted to Reader, and in 2018 to Professor of Physics. She authored around 100 publications and has been the recipient of several awards, such as an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Advanced Research Fellowship in 2006.

Professor Faria pursues a wide range of research interests, such as high-order harmonic generation and above-threshold ionization in atoms and molecules, correlated multielectron processes in strong fields, attosecond pulses, tailored fields, ultrafast imaging, and photoelectron holography. Recently, she has focused on quantum effects in the attosecond domain, and novel approaches for strong-field and attosecond physics. These novel approaches include the Coulomb Quantum Orbit Strong-Field Approximation (CQSFA), which is the first implementation of a strong-field path integral method in which the external laser field and the residual binding potentials are treated on equal footing. The CQSFA method enabled some of the most comprehensive studies of ultrafast photoelectron holography to date, from fundamental concepts to applications. She has also pioneered the analytical treatment of laser-induced nonsequential double ionization, showing that quantum interference in this context is far more robust than previously anticipated. This work called into question 20-year-old assumptions, which viewed NSDI as a purely classical phenomenon. Beyond strong-field physics, she has also worked on non-Hermitian Hamiltonian systems contributing to the development of a time-dependent framework for pseudo-Hermiian Hamilonians.

In 2021, she was awarded the highly prestigious Institute of Physics (IoP) Joseph Thomson Medal and Prize, "for distinguished contributions to the theory of strong-field laser-matter interactions, particularly the development of semi-analytical models bringing together attoscience and mathematical physics". She was also made an IoP Fellow in 2022.

She is a co-founder and chair of the online workshop Quantum Battles in Attoscience, and the Atto Fridays seminar series. Both aim to make world-leading science available free of charge to the global community and to discuss controversial topics in a controlled and collegial way (www.quantumbattles.com).