Personal CV

A anecdotal “potted” history ... you can find out more detailsabout my current research (LHCb) by selecting the link to the left.

Secondary Education onwards, some “pre-history” available too!

1971-1978: King Edward’s VI School, Birmingham. Studied Maths and Physics for A and S levels

1978-1981: New College, Oxford where I read physics  (and tried to row)

    1979 College Scholarhip

    1981: 1st Class Honours

Tutored (and motivated) by R. Stinchcombe and J. Silver.

    Was inspired to read physics by  R. McIlwaine. Fortunate to have some very brilliant classmates e.g. R. Borcherds who were (several) orders of magnitude smarter than me! Recall investing quite a bit of time in being poor at athletics and rugby and even worse at chess.

1981-1984: Queen Mary College, London University (PhD 1984)

    Worked closely with Graham Thompson and Bill Scott (RAL)  under the supervision of Peter Kalmus. Thesis concentrated on hadronic jets on the UA1 experiment at CERN.

    The UA1 (under the forceful leadership of Carlo Rubbia) and UA2 experiments were the first to observe the W and Z particles

    (Figure at left shows the first Z detected by UA1).

1984-1989: Worked at HEPL (home of the old CEA) at Harvard University as a Research Associate on the CLEO experiment (at Cornell University) for Dick Wilson and Frank Pipkin. Collaborated with K.Kinoshita, I. Shipsey, D. Bortolleto   and many others. Learned there existed a different, and inspiration style, of experimental leadership, from Karl Berkelman . My interest in B physics was fueled by Sheldon Stone (recently BTeV).

1989-1991: Joined Texas A&M University Dept of Physics, as an Assistant Professor, to work on the SSC and the CDF experiment. Worked with Peter McIntyre (a renaissance physicist!) and Bob Webb. My thanks to both  for a very exciting and rewarding two years.

In 1990-1991 I was an SSC fellow. Unfortunately the (already troubled) SSC, led by Roy Schwitters, was to be cancelled in 1993.  SSC was based just outside of Dallas, Texas a few hours from TAMU. The energy reach and physics scope of this experiment would have been outstanding. In all likelhood I would still be working on SSC if it had been built

In 1991 John Dainton and Erwin Gabathuler “lured” me back to the UK. Since 2002 I have held a personal chair in the Dept of Physics.

I have worked on B-lifetimes and TGCs under Paul Booth on the DELPHI experiment at CERN, and with Phil Allport both on ATLAS and DELPHI.

Since 1996 I have led the Liverpool group in designing, testing and building the sensors for the LHCb vertex detector. My colleagues websites and contact information can be found by following the links.

We hope to start taking data in 2007.