Dr Karol Hennessy

Personal Statement

I am a research associate in Experimental Particle Physics. I am on long
term attachment to CERN for the LHCb experiment. My research interest
focuses on the development of control and data acquistion (DAQ) systems
for for high energy physics experiments.

For LHCb, I have have been involved in the production, testing and
commissioning of the Vertex Locator (VELO) for LHC Runs 1 and 2 and
the VELO Upgrade for Run 3. I am responsible for ensuring the prior
to its installation at CERN. The VELO also provides an exciting area
of study with respect to silicon tracking detectors, and particularly
their performance in the extreme radiation environments such as the LHC.
I coordinate the data acquisition team for the VELO and am actively
involved in the development of the firmware that runs on the FPGAs of
the readout system.

For the next upgrade of LHCb, I am on the coordination team for the
Mighty Tracker, a 18 m^2 silicon tracking detector.

I have previously worked on the DUNE experiment, where I co-coordinated
the DAQ system for the ProtoDUNE-SP (also known as NP04) prototype at
CERN. ProtoDUNE-SP is a 6x6x6 m^3 liquid argon time projection chamber.
I was also on the coordination team for the DUNE far detector DAQ.

With colleagues at Liverpool, and in collaboration with LHCb and Intel,
I am also exploring the use of high-level FPGA programming using oneAPI.
This is an open-source C++ API for compute accelerators. The goal is
to demonstrate a Machine Learnt Particle Tracking algorithm inference
on an FPGA.