Natalia Toro

Early life and education

Toro is the daughter of Dr. Gabriel and Beatriz Toro. She began taking college level classes in sixth grade and was a member of the United States Physics Olympiad Team in 1998. At the age of 14 she won the 1999 Intel Science Talent Search, the youngest winner in the history of the prize. At the time, Toro was a senior at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado, having skipped fifth, seventh and eighth grade. She won the prize in recognition of research regarding the oscillations of neutrinos and their impact on high-energy physics undertaken at the Research Science Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Edmund Bertschinger served as her mentor.

Toro completed a PhD at Harvard University in 2007 under the supervision of Nima Arkani-Hamed. Her thesis was titled: Fundamental Physics at the Threshold of Discovery. Following the completion of her PhD, Toro worked as a research associate at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Between 2007–2010, she pursued postdoctoral studies in the Department of Physics at Stanford University.