Dr David Hutchcroft

I studied natural science and physics at Cambridge University as an undergraduate, going on to complete a PhD in high energy physics

there. I measured quantum chromodynamics effects in the decays of the Z^0 as part of the Opal collaboration, and performed search for supersymmetry with the Aleph collaboration, both at the Large Electron-Positron Collider. I became a CERN fellow in 2000, joining the LHCb collaboration, of which I am still a member. Joining the University of Liverpool in 2002, I worked on designing, building, simulating and collecting data with the LHCb vertex locator. The silicon strip detector was designed and built in Liverpool, being installed in LHCb at CERN in 2008 in time for the commissioning of the LHC.

In the period during the LHC construction I joined the BaBar collaboration based at SLAC, working on measuring the CKM angle α, and designing the data quality recording and data cleaning processes for the collaboration. As part of the Liverpool work to support the NA62 K-tag detector, for which Liverpool designed the readout electronics and mechanics I worked with the NA62 collaboration at CERN on the rare Kaon decays and readout support.

I as part of my collaboration with four major experiments I have guided many PhD students onto their successful degrees and future careers. I also supported many research associates on these collaborations and together we have made the Liverpool contributions to the collaborations very successful. With BaBar being mentioned as critical to the understand of the CKM matrix in the Nobel Laurent press release announcing the award to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa in 2008. More recently the LHCb collaboration, including myself, were awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

The international Grid collaboration was created to manage and process the data from the LHC experiments, I have managed the computer cluster that is part of that at Liverpool since 2012. This means managing the staff who are, or who have been, employed as part of the GridPP computing project and support the computing infrastructure deployed at Liverpool.

I have taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of Liverpool since 2002. I was granted a fellow of the higher education academy based on my teaching practice. I have supported the design of the Physics, School of Physical Science and university level teaching and assessment in different roles over the years.

While teaching PhD students I both support student individually but also through the LIV.DAT and since 2021 LIV.INNO centres for doctoral training at both the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University. This has included being the deputy director for each and in charge of the training programme for LIV.INNO. As part of the national level support for computing training I lead the 2020 STFC summer school (run online by UoL) and supported the 2024 school, hosted by LJMU. I am always looking for ways to use the skills I and my collaborators developed to study particle physics in other realms.