Aida X. El-Khadra
Aida X. El-Khadra is a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She works on the development of lattice field theory as a precision tool to quantify the nonperturbative effects of quantum chromodynamics, also known as the strong interactions. This work is needed for the interpretation of observations in high-energy experiments. Her lattice QCD research includes a broad program of calculations that enable precision tests of the standard model of particle physics or determinations of its fundamental parameters.
A recent focus of her lattice QCD research is on the hadronic corrections to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, and she serves as the chair of the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative. El-Khadra is also using quantum simulations to study novel quantum field theories, a new direction in her broad body of research.
She is Simons Foundation Fellow in Theoretical Physics, a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society and was the 2024 Schrödinger Visiting Professor at ETH Zürich, a Distinguished Scholar of Fermilab and a Sloan Foundation Fellow.
El-Khadra received her PhD in 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles after obtaining a Diploma in Physics from the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. She held postdoctoral research appointments at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Ohio State University before joining the Illinois faculty in 1995.