I work for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a "staff scientist" as part of the ATLAS collaboration. ATLAS is one of the detectors taking data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I work with my group on understanding the first collision data from the LHC taken in 2010 and 2011. We are looking for processes we know should be there, as well as searching for new ones! For the first four years I was on ATLAS, I was a postdoc with the Columbia group. I spent about two years at CERN working on the Liquid Argon Calorimeter - one of the key subsystems of ATLAS. Then, I was the contact person on ATLAS for the first searches for new heavy particles in the di-electron and di-muon channels. I also worked on understanding the high-pT electrons and muons used for these searches, especially for the electron channel. Now I'm involved with a new analysis looking for a fourth generation of quarks.

Before working at Columbia, I got my Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Michigan. I worked on the CDF Experiment at Fermilab. You can read about what I did on CDF in a description of my thesis for the general public. I did my undergraduate work at Cornell University, and I worked one year between undergrad and grad school at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, working with the Babar collaboration and doing my first ATLAS work in 2000-2001.

At LBNL, in addition to my ATLAS work, I'm taking on a new role working with the Particle Data Group.

As a graduate student in physics at the University of Michigan, I worked on the CDF Experiment at Fermilab.

You can read about what I did on CDF in a description of my thesis for the general public or find all the details in my thesis.

want to learn more about particle physics?

As a particle physicist, I try to understand what the world is made of and how the different types of particles interact with each other. Most of our knowledge of the theory is summed up in the Standard Model of physics. The Standard Model works really well, but it doesn't all tie together. We keep studying the particles and forces of in order to answer very basic questions about how the universe works.

If you want to learn more about particle physics I highly recommend the website The Particle Adventure. I really enjoyed Episode I and Episode II of movies about the ATLAS experiment at CERN, available on youtube. The web series "Colliding Particles" has excellent footage of before, during, and after the first collisions of the LHC, and it tells the story of the people working at CERN. Episode 02, "Big Bang Day," captures the spirit of CERN in 2008 really well.

For a more in-depth look at the physics, check out Lisa Randall's book "Warped Passages," which intersperses explanations of our current understanding about particle physics and personal stories about how she and others have worked on expanding our knowledge. You can also watch Brian Greene's PBS NOVA special "The Elegant Universe" on youtube.