My interest in high energy particle physics dates from approximately 10.20 a.m. on the 17th November 1981 during a 3rd year lecture at Cambridge when Richard Ansorge explained that all matter was made of quarks and leptons. Shortly thereafter I began work on a Ph.D. under the enthusiastic direction of Professor Alan Martin FRS at Durham.
The main goals were (and still are) to study the fundamental forces and particles of nature using information gained in high energy particle physics experiments. My PhD thesis was titled Studies in high energy proton-antiproton collisions and involved identifying signatures of new particles – fourth generation leptons and supersymmetric particles. My research took me back to Cambridge (1985-87) and to the major international accelerator laboratories at CERN, Geneva (1987-89) and Fermilab, Batavia (1989-91). In 1991 I returned to Durham. I was promoted to Reader in 1996 and to Professor in 2002 and have held a PPARC Senior Fellowship (2003-6) and a Wolfson Research Merit Award (2008-13). I was Director of the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (2005-10) and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. In 2017, my work was recognised through the John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh Medal and Prize by the UK Institute of Physics “for pioneering new methods for the application of perturbative quantum chromodynamics to high-energy processes involving energetic jets, leading to sophisticated simulation codes that are being used to describe LHC data.” Between 2017 and 2022 I was Head of the Physics Department.
Between 2014 and 2018 I coordinated the EU Framework 7 Initial Training Network HiggsTools which aimed to provide excellent initial training to young researchers in the field of high energy particle physics, paving the road for new discoveries about the fundamental nature of the Universe at a time when new discoveries are expected, and when the new Standard Model of Particle Physics is going to be forged. I was also the PI for an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant MCatNNLO (2014-2018) which aimed to make more precise predictions for physical observables at the LHC and other particle collider experiments, thereby leading to a more precise extraction of fundamental physics parameters, such as the couplings of the Higgs boson to other fundamental particles.
Publications
INSPIRE publications…(recent), Google Scholar, ORCID: 0000-0002-0173-4175, ResearcherID: A-4597-2012
Research Areas
- Precison predictions for the LHC
- Higgs boson phenomenology
- Loop integrals
PhD Students
I have been very lucky to have had many excellent PhD students working with me over the years. Their thesis topics are listed below.
