Marco Giacalone
Applied Physicist In Detector Simulation
Commune de Prévessin-Moëns, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMarco Giacalone is an applied physicist and detector-simulation expert at CERN with 8 years of experience spanning hardware development, data acquisition, and advanced data analysis in high-energy physics. He has led DAQ board development for the ALICE-TOF project, conducted radiation testing, and coordinated detector operations, combining deep physics insight with hands-on electronics and firmware skills. An active contributor to the ALICE software ecosystem, he has worked on alidist build and release automation and on AliPhysics analysis tooling, enhancing heavy-flavor decay analyses and data handling capabilities. He also brings industry-ready software practices from freelance hardware and software consulting, emphasizing reproducibility and robust deployment across GRID environments. Based in Prevessin-Moëns, France, he holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Bologna and has bridged research, software, and hardware to deliver end-to-end experimental solutions. He is known for translating complex detector challenges into practical, production-grade tooling with strong QA, testing, and cross-team collaboration.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
University of BolognaDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics at Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Italian, English, Spanish, French
Github Skills (20)
dataanalysis10
buildsystem10
application-framework10
c-language10
alice10
data-analytics10
bash10
high-energy-physics10
cmake10
script10
exp10
physics10
c-programming-language10
data-analysis10
cicd9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
alisw/AliPhysics
Mar 2021 - Jun 2022
ALICE Analysis Repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 11 PRs, 1 comment in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Marco primarily contributed to the ALICE physics analysis repository by modifying code related to the handling and analysis of heavy-flavor decay candidates within the ALICE experiment data. Their work involved increasing momentum limits in histograms, implementing tracklet subtraction for soft pions from D* mesons, and adding functionality for generating and using spherocity quantiles. Furthermore, they improved the framework by automatically converting mass values to MeV units and added the ability to use unweighted S0 selection.
physicspythoncernanalysisalice
alisw/alidist
Apr 2022 - Dec 2022
Recipes to build ALICE software
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
DevOps Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:37 reviews, 6 commits, 29 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Marco primarily contributed to the build and deployment process within the ALICE software ecosystem. Their work focused on defining module files for software packages like EPOS4 and making adjustments to the build scripts (e.g., `rivet.sh`, `agile.sh`, and `epos4.sh`) to integrate these packages correctly. The user addressed issues related to environment variables, directory structures, and dependency management to ensure proper functionality. These changes aimed to improve the reproducibility and usability of the software on various computing environments, including the GRID.
physicsrecipescernalicealice-experiment
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