Oz Amram

I’m Oz, a Wilson Fellow & Associate Scientist at Fermilab working on the intersection of Machine Learning and Particle Physics

I’m a member of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider hosted at CERN. CMS studies the fundamental particles and forces which constitute all matter in the universe. By studying these particle we hope help answer many questions we have about how nature works on its most fundamental level.

We attempt to answer these questions by colliding protons at the highest energies possible, millions of times a second, and measuring the results of these collisions in sophisticated specialized detectors. We use this avalanche of data to measure the properties of the known fundamental particles, and to look for new particles which would play a part in answering some of these deep questions.

I am particularly interested in ways in which Machine Learning & AI can help us in this grand quest!

One focus of my current research are searches for new particles based on ML-based anomaly detection. There are many types of new particles which could be hiding in LHC data and is impossible to design analyses to search for all of them individually. Anomaly detection is a new technique which searches through the data to find interesting ‘anomalous’ collisions containing new particles, without reference to a specific model of what new particles to look for. This allows searches with discovery potential to a much broader collection of new particles than traditional methods.
My ethos is that nature may be much stranger and more clever than us humans have guessed, so lets build strategies that are open to surprises.

I also work on generative models for fast simulations of particle interactions in calorimeters, ML-enhanced data-collection algorithms (triggers), and as well as various other new applications of ML & AI in particle physics.

I completed my PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 2022. My thesis was titled “Searching for Anomalies in Proton-Proton Collisions at the Large Hadron Collider”. I then joined Fermilab as a postdoctoral researcher, and 2026 I became a Wilson Fellow, a tenure-track equivalent associate scientist position.

I sometimes write for ParticleBites, which summarizes recent particle physics papers for a broad audience. You can read some of my recent posts here.