Tom Whyntie

Tom Whyntie was born in 1983. This makes him slightly younger than the W and Z gauge bosons, the force-carrying particles of the weak nuclear force. (Well, technically these have existed in their current form since a microsecond or so after the Big Bang, but it's been thirty odd years since we discovered them.) After reading Natural Sciences at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge (specialising in Experimental and Theoretical Physics), Tom accepted a place at Imperial College London to complete a PhD with the High Energy Physics group. He was assigned to the ironically-named "Compact Muon Solenoid" (CMS) experiment, a 15,000 tonne, cathedral-sized digital camera buried in Cessy, France, that would take pictures of the high energy particle collisions that would take place at the Large Hadron Collider. His thesis focussed on the search for supersymmetry - a theory which provided candidate particles for Dark Matter, which supposedly makes up a missing 26% of the Universe - in the LHC's first data. He didn't find it. However, a null result is still a result - and in 2011 was awarded his PhD, after which he briefly worked as a post-doctoral researcher on the upgrade of the CMS silicon detector system. However, in early 2012 an opportunity arose that would allow him to combine his love of both doing physics and talking about physics. The CERN@school project takes cutting-edge particle detectors developed by CERN's Medipix Collaboration into the classroom to allow students and teachers to conduct their own, original physics research. In June 2012 Tom became the full-time scientist for the project, based at the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury, Kent, and the Particle Physics Research Centre (PPRC) at Queen Mary, University of London. Tom is a regularly speaks about particle physics at science festivals and events around the country, notably the Times Cheltenham Science Festival and the British Science Association's British Science Festival. With Dr Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College, London, he also contributes to the YouTube "HeadSqueeze" channel's SciGuides, presenting a light-hearted look at the great questions in experimental and theoretical physics.