High-level commitment to the collaborative effort is reached i) performing detailed luminosity measurements, i.e., a crucial machine parameter and input to almost all analyses, ii) approving the usage of electromagnetic objects in the realm of TOP physics analysis group, i.e., an important role to facilitate the communication between physics analyses and calibration groups, and iii) monitoring online the overall and data acquisition (DAQ) systems, i.e., shift positions with heavy responsibility. The commitment to the collaborative effort has been always calculated higher than the required average of three months per year, while close attention has been paid in providing publication drafts with meticulous feedback on top of that minimally imposed by the wide-based institutional reviews.

The experimental parameter that enters in almost all physics analyses is the absolute number of collisions as recorded to the tape by the experiments, the scale of the so-called "integrated luminosity". Its knowledge is of paramount importance to precision studies at the LHC and HE- or HL-LHC. It is my honor to co-convene the entire CMS-wide efforts with a mandate from September 1st 2019 to August 31st 2021, a position high in the internal hierarchy and crucial to meet the challenging goals of all the physics projects. One of the most pressing questions in Nuclear Physics at the moment is the nature of the hadronic matter (known as quark-gluon plasma) created at very high collision energies. My research activities at KU focus on the first experimental observation of top quark production in heavy ion collisions and its applications. This novel phenomenon, one of the breakthroughs in Nuclear Physics, constitutes one of the most theoretically sound and cleanest possible experimental technique to time-resolve the quark-gluon plasma. The work is supported in whole by the Nuclear Physics (NP) program of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Having devoted the initial year to the first measurement of the t-channel single top quark production at 13 TeV, the second and third years have been even more productive including the updated measurement in the t-channel, and two pivotal first observations of the top pair production using: i) proton-proton collisions at center of mass energy of 5.02 TeV, and ii) proton-nucleus collisions at the record nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 8.16 TeV. A great deal of effort has been also put in studying the associated t-channel single top quark production with the Higgs boson, the latter decaying to a pair of photons, at 13 TeV. The strenuous effort translated to three peer-review journal publications—with the most prominent being also featured as editor’s suggestion in Phys. Rev. Lett. and CERN Courier—numerous physics analyses summaries, oral contributions to international conferences, poster presentations in national meetings and international conferences or workshops, and internal seminars.

Flow harmonics (both of even and odd order) stem from a so-called eccentricity-driven hydrodynamic expansion of the matter in the collision zone, i.e., a finite eccentricity drives uneven pressure gradients, hence the resulting anisotropic expansion leads to the anisotropic emission of particles about the reaction plane. During my research, second- to fourth-order Fourier coefficients ($\upsilon$_n, n=2-4) have been measured for Λ and Λ hyperons as a function of transverse momentum ($p$_T) in the (0-60)% most central lead-lead collisions at 2.76 TeV with the ALICE experiment and compared to various species. During the summer report, unmasking of background that mimics the behavior of signal candidates was furhter performed for the weak decay of the same hyperons. The feature space was split based on variables which describe the decay topology. Superior performance was found for the BDT technique, when compared to the regular hard cut method.