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15 minutes were spent coming up with the above sentence, oh dear. I come from the far away land of maple syrup – Canada. For the past couple of years, I’ve been living in London, and spending my time either (1) learning physics, (2) learning to code, or (3) rock climbing. Please see the very awesome photo below, which was definitely candid and not purposefully posed.

That was from my trip to Kalymnos (Greece), earlier this year, which is filled with either locals or enthusiastic rock climbers. In general, I adore being outdoors (preferable on mountains) and doing some kind of sport.

Aside from that, I love cooking as well, and spending time chatting with my two little brothers, who have endless profound questions I struggle to answer. But hey, it’s good training for exactly something like this!

Somewhere on the border of Switzerland and France, there is a monstrous underground tunnel that is powerful enough to speed up tiny tiny particles close to the speed of light. Then at some point, these particles are made to collide and BOOM BOOM BOOM we see all the incredible collisions, and all the particles flying out of the collisions, through our detectors.

This is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. And the detector that I work on is called ATLAS. To go into a bit of detail, my work involves sifting the the insane amount of data that comes from ATLAS, and trying to make sense of it.

This is a reconstructed image of a Higgs boson event, which came from proton collisions. The Higgs doesn’t live for very long, and decays into 4 electrons, which produces a very clear signature in our detector (the red/blue bands are the electrons). This type of signature is amongst one of which I am helping to measure 🙂

In the grand scheme of things, my work will help the physics community understand better the Standard Model (aka the model about the basic fundamental building blocks of the universe), and also in the long run can provide some insight into new physics that hasn’t yet been discovered (such as dark matter). Pretty cool stuff!

Our generation is the generation of computers. So, unsurprisingly, most of my time is spend hacking out code and making software run! It can be quite challenging at times, but very rewarding when you get nice results.

Coupled with that, I spend a lot of time reading scientific papers on topics that are relevant to my work. I interact a lot with the other scientists and students in my department, and find that they’ve got a lot to teach me that I can’t learn from reading.

As I mentioned, my work also requires me to spend a lot of time on planes. The physics community is very large, and there is a lot of research being done. All of this exciting stuff needs to be shared within the community, so there is an abundance of conferences and workshops that take place all year round, some of which I am lucky enough to attend 🙂