LIV.DAT student Tom Williams Harrison successfully completes PhD
LIV.DAT student Tom Williams Harrison has successfully defended his PhD thesis and passed his PhD viva to become Dr Tom Williams Harrison.
His PhD involved work to further the development of the LHCb upgrade detector at CERN. This work consisted of three main things: First, the LHCb software trigger was developed, with a tunable neural network component for identifying B mesons. Second, software was developed to test the ASICs in the upgrade Vertex Locator (VELO), and confirm that they perform as expected under various loads. Finally, a sensitivity study was carried out for the neutral B-meson to charged K-meson pair decay channels, to probe the feasibility of various physics analyses at LHCb during the third run of the LHC.
Tom said “The most academically and personally rewarding part of my PhD was probably the time I spent at CERN, getting to work alongside people at LHCb and directly contribute to the development of the upgrade detector”.
Since the end of January, he has been working at his new job in software engineering. He has been doing this while writing up his PhD thesis and found doing the two in parallel for two months a "’fun’ and unique challenge”!
Congratulations Tom!