What our alumni are up to

From SydneyHEPWiki

Research in High Energy Physics (HEP), both for senior undergraduates and postgraduates, provides a broad-based training on many levels, developing skills which can be used regardless of whether you continue in an academic or research career in HEP, or move on to other things. The ability to rigorously analyse a problem and figure out how to solve it, skills which are essential in experimental HEP, is something which any employer values.

Much of our work involves the use of high-performance computing, and the technical expertise that students gain in modern computing languages such as C++, in the understanding and dealing with large and complex computer codes, and in how to simulate a problem and make predictions which can be compared to experiment, stand them in good stead in fields that range from Information Technology to the Financial sector.

Many of our graduates in recent years have managed to secure good postdoctoral positions in HEP, enabling them to directly apply their research training. Here are some examples:

• Paul Soler, (Ph.D. graduate in 1993) worked with us here in Sydney as a postdoc on the NOMAD experiment, before moving to CERN for two years to a European Union Marie Curie Fellowship in 1998. He now has a permanent position in High Energy Physics at Glasgow University, working primarily on the CERN LHCb and HARP experiments.

• Steven Boyd, (Ph.D. graduate in 1999) secured a postdoc position at the University of Washington in Seattle, working on the K2K neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan. He then held a prestigious Monbusho Fellowship from the Japanese Government to continue work on K2K. He was based at the KEK laboratory, where the neutrino beam is produced and the near detector is located, as well as at the SuperKamiokande detector in western Japan which is the far detector for the K2K experiment. He then went to the University of Pittsburgh, to work on neutrino experiments performed at Fermilab near Chicago. Steven now has a permanent position at the University of Warwick, continuing to work on neutrino experiments.

• Bruce Yabsley, (Ph.D. graduate in 2000) moved to the KEK laboratory in Japan, where he held a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship for two years. He worked on the Belle experiment searching for CP Violation in the B meson system. He then held a postdoctoral position at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, who are also members of Belle. Currently he is working with us again in Sydney on Belle and ATLAS, as an ARC Australian Research Fellow.

• Andrew Godley, (Ph.D. graduate in 2001) moved to a postdoc in High Energy Physics at the University of South Carolina, working on the long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment MINOS, which sent neutrinos from Fermilab near Chicago to the SOUDAN mine, 730 km away in Minnesota. He also continued to work on NOMAD. Now he has moved into Medical Physics in the US.

• Malcolm Ellis, (Ph.D. graduate in 2002) held a postdoctoral position in High Energy Physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford in the U.K. He is now a postdoc at Imperial College London. Malcolm is working on the CERN HARP experiment, and on the development of future neutrino beams.

• Aldo Saavedra, (Ph.D. graduate in 2002) held a postdoctoral position at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, working on the ATLAS experiment which is being built for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He then held a postdoctoral position at the University of Glasgow, working on another LHC experiment, LHCB. Currently he is back working with us as a postdoctoral researcher on ATLAS.

Others have moved into other fields. Examples are:

• George Braoudakis, (Ph.D. graduate in 1993) did some lecturing in the School of Physics, before moving to a permanent position at ANSTO to work on neutron physics, where he has remained very busy with the new research reactor which was recently commissioned.

• Jiangui Wang, (Ph.D. graduate in 2001) held a postdoc at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the USA, working on Belle and based mostly at KEK in Japan. He then worked on Grid computing in Tsukuba. He now has a position at ANSTO.

The story has been similar with our sister group at the University of Melbourne. Graduates from that group are working in HEP both in Australia and overseas, as well as in Information Technology, Meteorology, Solar Cell research, Medical Physics, Telstra and Macquarie Bank.