Congratulations to Dr Barter who has been elected as LHCb-UK Physics Coordinator.
Dr William Barter has been elected as LHCb-UK Physics Coordinator for the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment.
The LHCb experiment is one of four large experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, investigating the physics of particles that contain either beauty quarks or charm quarks, searching for signs of new fundamental particles and forces of nature. The experiment has been running successfully for over a decade and has now entered a new era following a recent upgrade. This upgrade will collect significantly larger datasets, unlocking the potential for exciting new discoveries in the coming years.
The UK physics coordinator is responsible for coordinating the studies of over 200 scientists at the 11 UK institutes within the international collaboration that operates the LHCb detector. The holder of the role is chosen by these UK institutes in a nationally competitive election process. Following his election, Dr Barter will carry out this role for the next two years, leading the UK community within LHCb in an exciting and crucial period.
Congratulations to Dr Erin Goldstraw who has been awarded a Daphne Jackson fellowship.
Dr Erin Goldstraw will take up her appointment with the School of Mathematics with joint supervision from the School of Physics and Astronomy.
She completed her MSc in Mathematical Physics at the School of Physics and Astronomy in 2014/15, graduating with Distinction and receiving a class medal.
Dr Erin Goldstraw’s research project aims to combine current knowledge between plasma turbulence, solar physics and fusion research in a way that is understandable and useful for all of these fields.
Daphne Jackson Fellowships enable talented scientists and researchers to retrain and return to research after a break of two or more years.
The Daphne Jackson Trust was established in 1992 in memory of Professor Daphne Jackson – the UK’s first female Professor of Physics. Daphne devised a Fellowship scheme in the mid-1980s to support talented individuals wanting to return to research after a career break.
Professor Murray Campbell’s community service has been recognised with the award of the British Empire Medal.
Professor Donald Murray Campbell, Professor of Musical Acoustics, has been awarded the British Empire Medal for services to the Carlops Church and to the local community in Tweeddale and Edinburgh.
Professor Campbell has for several decades served Carlops Church in the voluntary roles of Session Clerk and organist. He is also a member of the Worship Leaders Team in the linked charge of West Tweeddale, and is currently Convener of the Lothian and Borders Presbytery Council. He and his wife Patsy are well known for their demonstration lectures to schools and community groups on the science and history of musical instruments.
The King’s Birthday Honours are announced each year to mark extraordinary contributions and achievements of people across the United Kingdom, including exceptional service to the UK overseas or internationally.
Congratulations to Gracie McGill who has been awarded a Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund.
The awardees of the 2024 Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund have been announced.
The fund aims to improve diversity in physics by offering scholarships to PhD students from groups currently under-represented in the physics research community.
Award recipient Gracie McGill will be joining the School of Physics and Astronomy in September and undertaking a PhD into how galaxies form and evolve. She will be working with observations from the new Euclid telescope to map stars in the outer regions of galaxies, known as stellar halos, in order to build up an archaeological record. Gracie has just completed an MPhys in Astrophysics at the School of Physics and Astronomy in Edinburgh.
The fund is made possible thanks to Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s donation of her £2.3m Breakthrough Prize. The fund is run by the Institute of Physics.
The under-represented groups listed in the eligibility criteria include women, students of Black-Caribbean, Black-African and other minority ethnic (BAME) heritage, students with disabilities, or who require additional funding to support inclusive learning, LGBT+ students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds who may struggle to find the levels of funding needed to complete their studies. People with qualifying refugee status who meet the above criteria are also eligible to apply.
Scholarship applications usually open in October with a closing date in January.
Congratulations to Chancellor’s Fellows Drs Gurtej Kanwar, Sarah Rugheimer and Catriona Wimberley.
Chancellor’s Fellows
The University of Edinburgh is committed to supporting talented early career researchers through the recruitment of Chancellor’s Fellows: a prestigious 5-year tenure track fellowship scheme focused on innovative research.
The Fellows recruited in this round will complement and extend research and innovation within the University and forge new areas of focus which may involve leading a major area of research, forging new industry partnerships, or driving initiatives to strengthen research-led teaching innovations.
The scheme builds in a focus on research and innovation in the first few years, and over time, Fellows will take up the full range of core academic activities, including teaching and academic leadership.
Dr Gurtej Kanwar
Dr Kanwar’s research focuses on the development of generative Artificial Intelligence methods and the advancement of fundamental physics with these tools. He is particularly interested in generative models capable of precisely sampling fluctuations of the quantum fields believed to describe all matter in our universe. These methods can overcome roadblocks in numerically challenging calculations necessary to better understand particle physics and to discover new physics. He will join the School in autumn 2024.
Dr Sarah Rugheimer
Dr Rugheimer is an astrophysicist working on the habitability of Earth-like exoplanets. In her research she models the climate and photochemistry of early Earth and Earth-like planets to better understand habitability and how we could detect and characterise habitable worlds with future telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory and LIFE – the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets. She will join the School in 2025.
Dr Catriona Wimberley
Dr Wimberley works in medical imaging physics and her fellowship will focus on the development of novel methods for the quantification of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging data, a functional, molecular imaging modality used in the study of diseases such as cancer and dementia. She will harness the most recent technological break throughs such as multi-modal imaging (PET and magnetic resonance) and Total Body PET and develop methods to extract more disease-relevant information from medical imaging data.
Congratulations to Susanna Richmond who has been awarded the University of Edinburgh’s Impact Enabler prize.
The Impact Enabler prize is awarded to a colleague who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to the development of impact culture and the delivery of tangible benefits from research and partnerships to communities and research users.
Ms Richmond works as the School’s Impact Research Officer, providing valuable support to colleagues and collaborators who are using research to tackle industrial and societal challenges.
The award was presented at the University’s inaugural Impact Festival. This event took place to celebrate the engagement and impact of the University’s research endeavours, and involved colleagues from PhD students to researchers, and technical and professional services staff.
In addition to Ms Richmond’s award, the School’s Particle Physics Experiment Group was shortlisted in the Team Culture category.
Results provide a glimpse of the telescope’s power and performance.
Early Release Observations
The Euclid Consortium have released early scientific papers based on observations made by the Euclid telescope. A number of targets have been observed and analysed by collaborators during this Early Release Observations (ERO) phase, giving a glimpse of the unprecedented power of this telescope, which is meant to provide the most precise map of our Universe over time.
Some of the science includes: new-born free-floating planet candidate, newly identified extragalactic star clusters, new low-mass dwarf galaxies in a nearby cluster of galaxies, and the discovery of very distant bright galaxies (seen during the first billion years of the Universe).
In addition to these first and promising scientific results, the Consortium also publishes the mission’s reference papers that confirm the outstanding performance of Euclid.
The Euclid Consortium
The Euclid Consortium comprises of more than 2600 members, including over 1000 researchers from more than 300 laboratories in 18 countries. The Consortium has been planning, building, and is currently operating the Euclid space telescope mission in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA).
Astronomers and developers from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Astronomy are playing a leading role in work associated with the Euclid satellite, including defining its scientific goals, designing its observations, developing its data processing methods, hosting the UK’s Euclid Science Data Centre, and carrying out the scientific analysis.
The telescope, launched on 1 July 2023, aims to map the extragalactic sky over a period of six years, providing unique data that can offer new insights into dark energy and dark matter.
Professor Andy Taylor from the University of Edinburgh, who leads the UK’s Euclid data analysis team and the Euclid gravitational lensing data analysis, said:
These new images from Euclid are absolutely stunning. They demonstrate both the image quality and the huge area of the sky seen by Euclid in each observation. The image of the galaxy cluster, Abell 2390, is a spectacular demonstration of Euclid’s ability to carry out the highest quality gravitational lensing survey we had hoped for. Each of the images are rich in information which we are only starting to mine. This is just a taster of what Euclid will do.
Professor Annette Ferguson from the University of Edinburgh, who is a member of the Local Universe ERO science team, said:
It has been incredibly exciting for me and my team to work with these first images from Euclid. The level of detail is truly astonishing, and the data has already yielded remarkable insights into some of the nearest galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
Reference papers
The first suite of Euclid publications describe the Euclid mission, its scientific instruments and its performance based on observations made by Euclid. Five of the papers will serve as key reference throughout the mission and beyond, while the other ten showcase the research conducted with the Early Release Observations data.
Image gallery
Professor Victoria Martin joins the 57 names recognised as being some of the greatest thinkers, researchers and practitioners working in or with Scotland today.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) has announced its 2024 intake of Fellows. Nominated for their individual excellence in a wide range of fields, they will be joining the 1,800 current Fellows of the RSE, Scotland’s National Academy.
Professor Martin’s research is in particle physics - studying the structure of the Universe at the smallest accessible scales. Her main interest is in understanding more about the Higgs boson and its relationship to the other fundamental particles that make up our Universe. She works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and has an interest in potential future colliders such as CLIC and FCC.
The RSE is an educational charity established in 1783. The RSE’s strength lies in the breadth of disciplines represented by its Fellowship. This range of expertise enables the RSE to take part in a host of activities such as: providing independent and expert advice to Government and Parliament; supporting aspiring entrepreneurs through mentorship; facilitating education programmes for young people, and engaging the general public through educational events.
Congratulations to Dr Davide Michieletto who has been awarded the British Biophysical Society Louise Jonson Early Career Award.
The British Biophysical Society (BBS) Louise Johnson Early Career Award is made every two years to an early career researcher in recognition of outstanding contributions in the fields of biophysics or biophysical methods.
In recognition of this award, Dr Michieletto will present a plenary lecture and receive a commemorative medal at the Biennial BBS Meeting in September 2024 in Swansea.
Dr Michieletto’s background is in polymer and statistical physics and he has track record in using both simulations and experiments. His current main line of research is inspired by how the genome in our cells is mechanically and topologically manipulated by proteins, and is focused on discovering new DNA-based soft materials and complex fluids that can change topology in time.
The BBS award was given in recognition of his contributions at the interface of soft matter and biophysics.
Congratulations to PhD student Annemiek Waajen who has been selected as a Schmidt Science Fellow.
PhD student Annemiek Waajenhas been selected as one of the 32 researchers in this year’s cohort of Schmidt Science Fellows.
This prestigious postdoctoral program harnesses an interdisciplinary approach as a way to break down silos among scientific fields in order to solve the world’s biggest challenges and support future leaders in STEM.
The 2024 fellows consist of 17 nationalities across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Annemiek was a PhD student with the UK Centre for Astrobiology, an interdisciplinary research centre established at the University of Edinburgh.
Microbiology to Bioinformatics
Annemiek’s postdoctoral research will focus on permafrost thawing and its impact on climate change.
The increasing temperatures in the Arctic, resulting from climate change, will lead to the thawing of currently frozen (permafrost) soils, soils that store large amounts of carbon. To what extent this will contribute to climate change is not well understood due to research limitations.
As a 2024 Schmidt Science Fellow, Annemiek plans to build a holistic perspective on permafrost thawing, comparing single-site and single-method studies in a global, multi-omics meta-analysis.
This insight will help address this issue and support policymakers in limiting its impact.
Schmidt Science Fellows
The Schmidt Science Fellows program provides the world’s best emerging scientists with new skills and perspectives to develop novel solutions to society’s challenges, become scientific and societal thought leaders, and accelerate ground-breaking discoveries.
Each Fellow will undertake a year-long Science Leadership Program to develop the skills, experience and networks necessary to become the next generation of interdisciplinary science leaders alongside a one- to two-year research placement at an internationally-renowned lab.
Schmidt Science Fellows is an initiative of Schmidt Sciences, delivered in partnership with the Rhodes Trust.