Brief Vita

• University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Assistant Professor (2020-Present)
• Enrico Fermi Institute, U. of Chicago, Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2020)
• PhD Physics, University of California, Berkeley (2016)
• MA Physics, University of California, Berkeley (2013)
• BA Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics, Harvard University (2011)

Selected Honors

• UT Society of Physics Students Research Advisor of the Year (2025)
• UT Academic Honors (Office of the Provost) Professional Promise and Creative Activity Award (2025)
• UT College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Research and Creative Achievement Award-Early Career (2025)
• Sloan Research Fellow (2025)
• Cottrell Scholar Award (2024)
• UT Society of Physics Students Research Advisor of the Year (2023)
• DOE Early Career Research Award (2022-2027)
• Robert R. McCormick Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, University of Chicago (2017-2019)
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2011-2016)

Highlights

• Tova Holmes Featured on BBC Science in Action
• Tova Holmes Wins Simons Foundation Support for Muon Collider Groundwork
• The Art of Muon Collisions
• The (Particle) Detectorists

Research Areas

I’m an experimental particle physicist searching for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model. My work is centered at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, where I worked first with the ATLAS Experiment, and now with the CMS Experiment. I work collaboratively with thousands of physicists around the globe to build and operate massive particle detectors, and lead smaller teams to use their data to search for new particles.

My team searches for signs of new phenomena with unconventional signatures: new particles with diffuse decays or metastable lifetimes that make them challenging for our conventional reconstruction techniques to identify. I also work in hardware-based pattern recognition, and am currently building a new system that will enable the CMS detector to build particle trajectories in real time for each LHC collision. 

I’m also working towards a future Muon Collider. I’m one of the coordinators of the US R&D effort, and my team works on building detector designs that can withstand the challenging backgrounds associated with a Muon Collider’s metastable beam. 

Personal Website