About Myself

I have been a research scientist in physics and engineering for my whole career. This definition of "research scientist" is maybe more broad than many may think. In my case it includes doing whatever it takes to get the experiment to run, to believe the data, to make the hardware work, and to stare at the data from a variety of angles with a variety of tools. I also have been lucky to share my love of science with people from ages 14 and up, with outreach efforts to middle school children and with my mentorship of the Vanderbilt-QuarkNet Program for high school science teachers, as well as public talks.

I have been lucky to work with very good people over my career which includes as a post-doctoral researcher and research professor at the Vanderbilt Free-electron Laser (FEL), a novel tunable MIR laser that one could tune from 1.9 microns to 9.9 micron laser light with enough power to cut human tissue and modify materials. I eventually was promoted to the Associate Director for Operations at the Center in charge of the team maintaining the laser, planning upgrades, scheduling experiments, and aiding in the use of the invisible laser in experiments. In the ten years I served in that role, I was able to learn nearly every bolt and system in the device. This included a microwave pulsed power system to create ~10 microseconds of 30 MW at 2856 MHz and pulsing at 30 Hz. This created and accelerated an electron beam to about 40 MeV which when focused into the magnetic wiggler/undulator served as the amplifying medium for the laser. So tune the electron beam energy (mostly), you change the laser wavelength. The Vanderbilt FEL wss very successful in operational time and predictability, and was able to be used as a research device in the resection of 3 brain tumors and 5 optic nerve sheath fenestrations.

At the Vanderbilt FEL Center, I also had the privelege to work on the rehabilitation of the MXI Systems, Inc, very novel Compton back-scattered x-ray source. This used an electron bunch (single bunch) accelerated from 20 to 50 MeV and was collided with a tabletop terawatt laser capable of 10 J in a few ps, also in a single pulse. Early parts of that large laser were used to generate UV to create the electrons in a radiofrequency cavity.

As these projects lost funding, I was able to move over to particle physics and work with the great folks in the Vanderbilt Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) group. Where I worked on the detector control system for the Pixel detector subsystem and the Strips detector subdetector. I was co-leader of those working on DCS for these systems and responsible for integrating those systems into the main CMS control system. I also oversaw the Siemens system that ran the safety system for the Pixel sub-detector. This was in the early days of the LHC. I was able to be there then the second startup of the beam and collisions occured in 2009, and witnessed the rise in beam energy and power. Helped run the CMS detector. These were some of the early data collection that led to the discovery of the Higgs Boson, announced on July 4, 2012.

I was unable to stay in that position as the job became a full-time job at CERN, which did not work for me and my family. For a short time I was a high-school teacher of AP Physics and Astronomy. Both were fun classes and both had different challenges. I came away thinking we do not either pay our teachers enough nor give them enough respect for the hard work that most of them do quite well.

Again I was luck to be able to work with my past director from the FEL on a small scale experiment, using diamond-like graphite needles to use field-emission to create high quality electron beams. Again the team was exceptional. We had great "luck" creating arrays of 9 nm (radius of curvature) needles and after processing having nearly all emit electron beams---these arrays could be 100x100 on the silicon wafer. We worked hard for a single such needle to work, and those successes were harder to create and to keep working. The goal in the single needle case was to make a single electron beam, usually relatively low current, but with exquisite emittance and hence brightness.

As is the lot of research assistant professor, that position wound down eventually. I had the opportunity to work in two very different seeming fields, creation of hardware and control systems for a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) device to test for tuberculosis, malaria, and similar diseases. Early in the project I took the lead in creating a laptop base LabVIEW program to run the devices. Those devices included with use of magnetic beads with biomolecules to carry the genetic products from the bacteria through oil or air valves into different chambers for automating the sample preparation. Finally moved to the last chamber, PCR amplification was performed and monitored by fluorescence signal.

Overlapping with my engineering work on the PCR devices, I joined a Vanderbilt astrophysics group to work on gravitational radiation, researching novel sources in the frequency band for the planned LISA space-based detector. I was also working on novel analysis methods for data sets from the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. We especially focused on looking at data sets that might represent high mass black hole binaries, so-called Intermediate Mass Black Holes. At Vanderblt, we also focused on running the analysis on the Open Science Grid.