Maria
da Conceição Bento, who recently and prematurely passed away, left many
friends and colleagues that admired her, both as a scientist and as a
person, and she will be dearly missed.
The Center for Theoretical Particle
Physics (CFTP) is organizing a symposium in her honour. This
event will be the opportunity to remember her work and devotion to
theoretical physics.
Maria da Conceição Bento was originally trained in Particle Physics, focusing mainly on Higgs physics and supergravity models derived at the low-energy limit of string theory. She then became interested in theoretical problems at the interface of cosmology and high-energy particle physics, namely, on the issues of dark energy, dark matter and inflation. After obtaining her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1987, she became professor at the Physics Department of IST. She was a permanent member of CFTP and, during her scientific career, also held research positions at the University of Heidelberg, University of London and CERN Theory Division.
In 1999, she won the Third Prize in the Essay Contest of the Gravity Research Foundation for the essay "Compactification, Vacuum Energy and Quintessence", written with Orfeu Bertolami. She also received Honourable Mentions in the contests of 1995 and 2003. In 2001, Maria da Conceição Bento, together with Orfeu Bertolami and Rogério Rosenfeld, was the recipient of the Prize União Latina/Universidade Técnica de Lisboa for the article "Cosmological Constraints on an Invisibly Decaying Higgs Boson".
There will be no registration fee to attend the symposium, however, in order to help us organizing the event, please let us know by email if you plan to participate and, in that case, if you wish to give a talk.
The Organizing Committee