Rate My Professor Christine McLean

Christine McLean is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Buffalo, College of Arts and Sciences. She received her BS in Physics from the College of William and Mary in 2012 and her PhD in Physics from the University of California, Davis in 2018. Her doctoral thesis, titled 'Search for High-Mass Top Quark Pair Resonances with the CMS Experiment,' was advised by Robin Erbacher. After completing her PhD, McLean served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Physics at the University at Buffalo from 2018 to 2022. From 2022 to 2025, she worked as an Assistant Physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, contributing to high energy physics research. In early 2025, she joined the University at Buffalo faculty as part of the new hires in the College of Arts and Sciences.

McLean's research is centered in high energy experimental physics within the High Energy Physics and Cosmology group. Her specialties encompass the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider and precision Higgs physics employing state-of-the-art tracking detectors. Her investigations include measurements of proton-proton collisions producing W and Z bosons in association with Higgs bosons. She has participated in CMS collaboration activities, such as developments for the High Luminosity LHC upgrade and the CMS Outer Tracker. McLean received the LPC Distinguished Researcher Award in 2022. She delivered the seminar 'Precision Higgs Physics with State-of-the-Art Tracking Detectors' at the University at Buffalo Department of Physics in April 2024. Her publications, accessible via INSPIRE-HEP, include contributions to works such as 'Jets and Jet Substructure at Future Colliders' (Frontiers in Physics, 2022), 'Jet Substructure at the Large Hadron Collider' (Reviews of Modern Physics, 2019), 'Explainable AI for ML Jet Taggers Using Expert Variables and Location-Aware Graph Attention Networks' (Journal of High Energy Physics, 2021), and 'Searches for High-Mass tt Resonances at CMS' (conference article). McLean is also a member of the US Muon Collider Collaboration.