I'm an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow working in galaxy evolution and observational cosmology at the School of Physics and Astronomy in St Andrews. I did my undergraduate and PhD at Edinburgh, after which I moved to Portsmouth as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation for 5.5 years. I moved back to Scotland in March 2014 when I took up my current fellowship in St Andrews.
Since passing on the SUPA baton to Alan in May I seem to have been busier than ever, mainly in the area of contributing to international planning for the future of the gravitational wave field but also in helping with the preparation of our collaborative consortium grant application to STFC and spending time - but not enough yet - in the lab with our graduate students, with me being taught how to do experimental research in the computer automated era.
SUPA physicists have had pivotal roles during the first year of operations of the LHC detectors during Run 2, at 13 TeV proton-proton collision centre-of-mass energies. After the discovery of the Higgs boson, the main goals have been to characterise the main Standard Model processes at 13 TeV and to search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model.
Calling on Scotland’s brightest ideas
Scotland’s leading company creation competition and start up development programme for students, graduates and staff from the country’s universities and research institutes is today (Monday 8 February) launching its 2016 programme – its biggest to date with new partnerships and a new award to attract a wider range of applicants.
In a recent publication in Nature Physics [Gonzalez-Izquierdo et al, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys3613], a team of researchers led by Prof. Paul McKenna have discovered that diffraction of ultra-intense laser light passing through a normally opaque plasma can be used to control charged particle motion.
SUPA continues to be proud to support a range of Distinguished and International Visitors and Events. In the last year, we have supported visits by:
Again in 2014/15, we were delighted to be able to offer funding for some of our brightest and best PhD students, Postdocs and Early Career Researchers to visit partner institutions around the world to undertake collaborative research and experiments. Funding was awarded to SUPA by SFC for this programme for the fourth time in 2014/15, and some of the funded visits were:
