Profile

I’ve not always wanted to work in Physics, I went through quite a few career change ideas! First I wanted to be a vet, because I loved animals, but I quickly learned (with the help of some work experience) how hard that job is, so I pivoted to other sciences.

Around GCSE I learned about astronomy, and in 2008 the Large Hadron Collider turned on, introducing me to Particle Physics! I did a gap year work experience at the University of Liverpool after my A levels working on a particle physics experiment…and never left! I still work on this one, albeit with a gap to get the degrees I needed 😀

I studied physics with theoretical physics at Imperial College London, and then did my PhD on Particle Physics at UCL. Now I work as a postdoc at the University of Liverpool, with my time split between here and Fermilab in the USA.

I mainly work on two experiments:

• The muon g-2 experiment, which studies how these muons behave when you put them in a magnetic field – because the muons themselves behave a bit like a tiny magnet, they react to this field and wobble. How quickly they wobble actually depends on how they play along with every other particle in existence! So by measuring that wobble really, really precisely, we can figure out what we’re missing, if anything.
• The Mu2e experiment: this is also looking at muons, but instead at how they decay! Normally, muons decay into an electron and another type of particle called a neutrino – we’ve known about this for a long time. But, calculations from our theories suggest we might be able to get a muon changing into an electron without the neutrino – it’s just very very unlikely. If there’s new physics out there, that might make it more likely, so we’re trying to measure how many of these we see over a time period, to see if there’s more than we expect!

Across these I’ve worked on hardware (I helped build some of the particle detectors for the g-2 experiment, called the trackers – see my photos to see what one looks like!), software (for mu2e, my current job is helping build the software for one detector which will collect and process the data) and analysis (on g-2, I’m looking for an extra rare wobble that may or may not be there, but if it is, that’s definitely new physics).  I’ve also worked in ‘operations’, that is, actually running these giant experiments, where you end up in charge and have to make sure the data keeps flowing in!

This can look a bit different if I’m out at Fermilab, which is where both my experiments are – a typical day there will have more hands-on work putting things together and testing whether they work as expected. In America, you have to drive to get anywhere, so for lunch we’ll go exploring! Our favourite is panera bread or tacos, though not from taco bell!

Sometimes I travel to give talks to schools, and that’s when Pascal the dragon comes out! It can be really hard to tell how big things are, so he’s a good scale marker (pun intended).