Maria-Myrto Prapa

Maria Myrto Prapa is a PhD candidate at the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences of the National Technical University of Athens. She holds her bachelor’s degree of Science in Physics from the University of Ioannina, where she defended her thesis “The Jet Trigger of the CMS Calorimeter”. She obtained her M.Sc. in Modern Electronic Technologies from the University of Ioannina in 2018, graded Excellent, after defending her thesis “Development of a Jet Trigger Design in FPGA” which included the introduction of Boosted Decision Trees results in the Jet Firmware of the CMS Calorimeter. She is currently working for ATLAS and is a part of the New Small Wheel experiment. Her research focuses on FPGA firmware development in VHDL and electronics as a part of detector and trigger physics.

As a part of the NCSR Demokritos team in ATLAS, she has created a testbench using an FMC board and a Virtex 7 Evaluation board for testing electronics prior to their mounting in the detector. Due to her background in software development from an early age, she has also worked in simulation methods for results that help the development of Micromegas detectors. She is currently responsible for the Sector Logic Testbench which will assist testing and latency calculations and features the usage of the FPGA as a NIC using Ethernet/UDP protocols.

Other research interests include the usage of FPGAs in low latency applications, creation of protocols and adaptation of known software procedures in FPGA designs, as well as further applications of appropriate ML/NN techniques which can be used to process data using FPGAs. Maria is an avid puzzle solver and hence, enjoys the riddles debugging has to offer!