Auger Spokespersons

Antonella Castellina

Spokesperson since November 2023, Co-Spokesperson 2017 - 2023

Antonella Castellina is Director of Research at INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) and associated for Scientific Research to INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), Torino, Italy. Before studying particle astrophysics, her research focussed on diffractive physics in forward multi-particle spectrometers and on calorimeters for the study of proton decay (as fellow member of UCLA, Los Angeles, and CERN).

She then studied neutrinos from stellar collapses at the underground laboratories of Mont Blanc and Gran Sasso, and extensive air showers at the EAS-TOP observatory, where she lead the analysis of the data from the hadronic calorimeter. She is author of the monograph "Astrophysics of Galactic Charged Cosmic Rays”, in vol. 5 of "Stellar Systems and Galactic Structures”. In 2001 she joined the Pierre Auger Collaboration, focussing mainly on the study of cosmic ray composition and hadronic interactions and, most recently, on the development of the AugerPrime detectors.

Markus Roth

Co-Spokesperson since November 2023

Markus Roth is senior scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. His research interests are related to the physics and detection of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. His main focus is on the analysis chain from detector calibration to event reconstruction up to high-level analyses. His most recent work centres on the Auger observatory upgrade, AugerPrime.

Roth received his PhD at the Univ. of Tübingen (Germany) in 1998. Before joining the Pierre Auger Collaboration in 2002, he worked inter alia on the KASCADE-Grande experiment in Karlsruhe (Germany). A Fyodor Lynen Fellowship at the University of Leeds (UK) gave him his first insight into the field of UHECR. Prior to being elected as co-spokesperson he has been leader of various tasks within Auger. Roth is one of the the leading figures at the Helmholtz International Research School for Astroparticle Physics and Enabling Technologies of KIT and the Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM), Buenos Aires (Argentina). He holds various positions within the astroparticle physics community.