Professor Mark Thomson

Mark is a Professorial Fellow and one of our Teaching Fellows in Natural Sciences. He is Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University's Department of Physics. In his role as Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), he is currently on secondment to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology.

Biography

Mark studied physics at the University of Oxford, completing his D. Phil in Particle Physics in 1991, studying cosmic ray muons in a deep underground experiment in Minnesota. Subsequently, he became a Research Fellow at UCL, working on the OPAL experiment at CERN and then became a staff physicist at CERN. In 2000, he returned to the UK to take up a lectureship at the University of Cambridge and a Fellowship at Emmanuel. He was Director of Studies for Physical Natural Sciences for over ten years, and supervised all first and second–year Physics courses.

In 2013, he published 'Modern Particle Physics', which is one of the most widely adopted particle physics textbooks. In 2015 he became the first co–spokesperson of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which will be the largest US particle physics experiment ever constructed, firing neutrinos from Fermilab (near Chicago) to vast liquid argon detectors deep underground in South Dakota. In 2018 he became Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, responsible for funding particle physics and astronomy, operating the UK's largest research infrastructures at Harwell, and representing the UK at CERN and SKAO Councils.

Teaching

He has taught all first and second year Physics courses at the College, and third and fourth year Nuclear and Particle Physics courses for the University.

Research

Mark's research has focused on two main areas. He has led a number of the main studies of the Z and W bosons at CERN's Large Electron Positron Collider,  understanding the electroweak unification at past and future electron-positron colliders, and also worked on the physics case and detector design for future linear electron positron colliders to study the Higgs boson. In parallel, he has had a long–term interest in the physics on neutrinos. At the MINOS experiments in the US, he studied neutrino oscillations, looking at atmospheric neutrinos and oscillations from the NuMI beam fired from Fermilab to the MINOS detector 735 miles away in the Soudan mine, Northern Minnesota. He has also played a leading role in the Deep Underground Neutrino Project (DUNE) at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF/DUNE).