With proton precision

摘要

I found that I was naturally good at science so was able to bumble my way through school and sixth form college, while never being really sure what I wanted to do. My main interest at that time was American football; that was all down to the TV coverage on Channel 4 and a friend of mine who had American relatives. Ironically my science teacher at school had suggested that I could have a great career in medical science, this confused me mightily as I was far more interested in physics! When I was thinking about what I wanted to study at university I had some vague idea about wanting to design computer chips, so looked at places that did physics with computer science. If the University of Surrey had offered this course I would almost certainly have gone there; I had been on a taster course and really liked it. However, they didn't, so I chose Brunel; like Surrey it had the advantage of being close to home, allowing me to keep playing American football for my local team, the Farnham Knights. At the time I was Great Britain captain and was just about to go on tour to the US so wanted to maintain that connection. Within about three months of arrival I had switched off physics with computer science and picked up the straight MPhys course on the advice of one of the course tutors, Brian Betts. At that point I still hadn't really thought about why I was doing it, but by the time I reached my final year I realised how easy I found physics, a sure-fire sign that I was doing something I was good at! At the end of my MPhys I took up a PhD place at Brunel working on the BaBar experiment at Stanford. Sadly, the Physics Department was closed pretty soon after, coupled with my supervisor leaving it was quite a difficult time. Fortunately I managed to transfer from doing particle physics at Brunel to doing accelerator physics at Oxford about a year and a half in, and basically started my PhD again completely from scratch. In some ways I did two PhDs in one, given that I'd already done 18 months of work on scintillator crystals for the BaBar calorimeter with Hilger Crystals. Once at Oxford I immediately got sent out to Stanford and spent some twenty months at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) doing all the experimental work for my DPhil. I returned in late 2002 to 6 months of solid writing and submitted my thesis in the spring of 2003.