Peter Clarke

Photo of Professor P Clarke, FRSE, C.Eng, C.Phys, FIET, FInstP
Professor P Clarke, FRSE, C.Eng, C.Phys, FIET, FInstP

Professor P Clarke, FRSE, C.Eng, C.Phys, FIET, FInstP

Position
Professor
Category
Academic staff
Location
James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB)
Room 3421

Peter is a member of the following School research institute, research group and research areas:

Research interests

Peter Clarke is Professor of  Physics at the University of Edinburgh.  He has a 1st Class Honours degree in Electronics Engineering (Southampton University,1980) and a D.Phil in Particle Physics (Oxford 1985). He was a CERN Fellow before being appointed as a lecturer first at Brunel University in 1987 and then moving to University College London in 1993. He was promoted to Reader and then Professor in 2001 and was Head of the Particle Physics Research Group between 2001-04. He moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2004 to take up the Chair of eScience and later become Director of the National eScience Centre 2006-09. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Engineering and Technology.

His early research work included the first direct measurements of CP violation in the Kaon system at CERN;  Working at the SLD experiment at the Stanford Linear Collider (USA) and then the LEP electron positron collider at CERN he worked on precision measurements of the electro-weak interaction, the properties of the Z and W bosons and indirect searches for the Higgs boson. At UCL he worked on construction of the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider

He was  involved in UK e-Science since its inception. He was a founder of  the Centre of Excellence in Networked Systems at UCL and was prominent in  advancing national and international networking  for research. He has held roles in international grid computing infrastructure projects including the management board of the UK grid for particle physics (GridPP), the European Data Grid and the EGEE projects. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Grid Forum international standards body between 2002-04 and co-Director of the Data Area.

His present research is as a member of the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. LHCb is searching for the signals associated with the imbalance between the interactions of mattter and anti-matter. He has produced the worlds most precise measurement of a CP violating phase called "phis" and he is deputy computing coordinator of the experiment.

  • 1st year introduction to physics (P1B) 2005-2010.
  • 1st year UG laboratories 2005-2009
  • 2nd year undergraduate laboratories 2012-present
  • Numerical recipes 2013-present

Peter currently offers the following PhD project opportunities: