Ongoing Research

I currently work on the ATLAS experiment where I focus on measuring rare Standard Model processes and using rare SM processes as a tool for the discovery of particles beyond the SM.

• Standard Model multi-boson measurements:
• From Oct 2019 - Sept 2021 I served as convener of the Standard Model Electroweak subgroup, which contains ~30 ongoing analyses and over 200 researchers at any given time. The anlayses in our group include precision differental diboson measurements, searches/first observation of rare SM multi-boson processes, and effective field theory interpretations.
• I recently completed two measurements of electroweak processes sensitive to the quartic gauge coupling with two W bosons and two photons.
Lepton flavour universality in B-decays:
• I started the first effort on ATLAS to measure lepton flavour violation in B-meson decays through the measurement of the ratios of rare state decays to electrons and muons.
• My efforts were been focused on the development of a trigger for the electron channels and retuning of the electron identification algorithms to correctly identify electrons that are close-by or from a secondary vertex.

PhD Research

I worked on searches for hadronically-decaying long-lived, neutral particles in ATLAS, with a focus on the reconstruction of decays in the muon spectrometer. My main contributions were as follows:

• Analysis contact for Run-2 searches for displaced hadronic jets searches:
• Contact for a group of analyses covering the reconstruction of decays in the inner detector, hadronic calorimeter, and muon spectrometer.
• Organise weekly analysis meetings.
• Ensure compliance with the latest recommendations from detector and physics performance groups.
• Custom triggers for long-lived particles:
• Maintain and improve Run-2 triggers for displaced decays.
• Determine systematic uncertainties and scale factors due to mismodeling in monte carlo (MC) simulation
• Identification and reconstruction of muon spectrometer decays:
• Studied 13 TeV muon spectrometer vertex reconstruction performance
• Performed data -- MC comparisons for systematic uncertainties.
• Created a monitoring tool to study each step of vertex formation
• Made improvements to seed criteria in for track formation, which boosted performance timing and algorithm robustness.
• Creation and maintenance of analysis software using the RootCore framework

Phenomenology work

Data-driven Model-independent Searches for Long-lived Particles

One of the interests I have developed over my time on ATLAS is in designing searches to be optimally recast able by the theory community. To this end, I worked with two theorists and two experimentalists on a paper outlining a method for model-independent searches for long-lived particles. This approach allows us to perform a coarse, topology-based search, covering a much larger area of phase space than the currently published analysis.

A. Coccaro, D. Curtin, H. J. Lubatti, H. Russell, and J. Shelton, Phys. Rev. D94, 113003 (2016), arXiv:1605.02742 [hep-ph].

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B-physics and Light States trigger coordination (Oct 2017 - April 2019)

I coordinated the B-physics and Light states trigger group, managing a team of around ten physicists to ensure the optimal performance of triggers selecting B-meson (and other light state) candidates. This has involved close collaboration with both the physics analyses within the B-physics and Light States Working Group and the trigger community. During my tenure as coordinator, I have:

• Developed triggers targeting new final states that ATLAS has previously not been able to study
• Optimised the data-taking strategy to ensure that we are recording as many B-physics events as possible, within the various rate and bandwidth limitations
• Supervised of students working on qualification tasks
• Maintained the B-physics trigger code.

Trigger menu work (Jan 2017 - present)

I work in a small team of experts to ensure that the ATLAS Trigger Menu is ready for data-taking and Monte Carlo campaigns. This task involves:

• Careful implementation and validation of new triggers for physics analyses, performance, data quality, and detector monitoring
• Development and maintenance of monitoring tools used in trigger operations
• Week-long expert on-call shifts

Data preparation (2016 - 2017)

• Co-coordinate the selection and processing of raw events into a specialised data stream.
• Developed a set of tools for monitoring the rate of each individual component of this data stream.

Muon data quality (2013 - 2016)

I was responsible for offline data quality monitoring for the Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers. This involved:

• Updating and maintaining the existing software.
• Investigating of a new type of noise identified by the monitoring software during cosmic runs in summer 2015.
• Developing new monitoring to quickly characterise noise in future data taking.
• Supervising two PhD students at CERN during summer 2015, one in developing a method for baseline noise calculation in MDTs, and the other in developing and improving the offline MDT data quality software.
• Taking shifts both as an offline muon data quality expert and shifter.

Teaching

I currently teach PHYS 215 (Introductory Quantum Mechanics) and PHYS 321A (Classical Mechanics I)

Assistant Professor, University of Victoria

Sept 2021 -

Senior Research Fellow, CERN

Oct 2020 - Aug 2021

Research Associate, McGill University

Jan 2017 - Sept 2020

U.S. ATLAS Outstanding Graduate Student Award

For exceptional contributions to the ATLAS experiment

Henderson Prize (Department of Physics, University of Washington)

For an outstanding Ph.D. thesis