Marzia Bordone is a specialist in flavour physics, a field that studies the fundamental structure of matter through the properties and interactions of elementary particles. Her research focuses on the hierarchy of fermion masses and quark mixing. With her inaugural lecture in April 2026, Marzia Bordone officially joins Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and PRISMA⁺⁺ as head of her own research group.

Born in Chiavari, Italy, in 1989, Marzia Bordone received her Master’s degree at the University of Genoa in 2014. Moving to Zürich, she focused her Ph.D. studies on several aspects of flavour physics and finishing her doctorate with the thesis “B physics in the Standard Model and Beyond” in 2018. Before returning to work as a postdoctoral researcher in Zürich in 2025, she gathered experience at the University of Siegen, Torino University and at CERN.

Flavour physics and the Standard Model

“One of the most striking and least understood features of the Standard Model of particle physics is the hierarchical pattern of fermion masses and quark mixing,” says Marzia Bordone. “Understanding the origin and structure of these flavour hierarchies remains one of the central open questions in particle physics. At the same time, they provide some of the most stringent precision tests of the Standard Model.”

“Because flavour-changing processes are highly suppressed and theoretically well controlled, even small deviations from Standard Model predictions can point to new physics beyond the reach of current colliders.”

“My research program focuses on particle-physics phenomenology at the precision frontier of flavour physics. I develop and combine modern theoretical tools — including effective field theories, lattice QCD inputs, QCD sum rules, dispersive methods, and higher-order perturbative calculations — to obtain systematically controlled predictions for semileptonic and rare heavy-hadron decays. A central aspect of this work is the construction of global analyses that consistently integrate theoretical constraints with experimental data, enabling stringent tests of the Standard Model and model-independent searches for new physics.”