Mariana is a postdoctoral researcher in the Laser Plasma Accelerator Group at the University of Oxford, where she works with Professor Hooker on the Plasma-Modulated Plasma Accelerator (P-MoPA) project.
She completed her PhD on the hosing and self-modulation instabilities of particle bunches in plasma, work that earned her the John Dawson Thesis Prize. She previously worked at CERN on the AWAKE experiment, which studies plasma wakefield acceleration with proton beams.
Alongside her research, Mariana develops and maintains , an open-source Python package for analysing particle-in-cell simulation data.
Research interests
plasma-based acceleration, plasma instabilities