Welcome to my personal homepage.
Most of my professional life is spent mentoring students,
post docs, and junior faculty at my home institution and
elsewhere. I'm happy to do this because, firstly, it is
highly rewarding. Secondly, it keeps me motivated and
intellectually engaged. Thirdly, there is always that tiny
chance that I might have inspired someone who one day will
change the world for the better.
What I try to do is to help each young person strive for excellence while maintaining a ferocious curiosity about the world. Research is not for everyone. It is mostly difficult, frustrating, and stressful. But, once in a while, it is exhilirating, euphoric, sublime. Being party to a discovery is a truly awesome experience and I have had the good fortune of experiencing the thrill of discovery four times: the 1979 discovery of the gluon at DESY, Hamburg, Germany; the 1995 discovery of the top quark at Fermilab, Batavia, USA, followed, at the same lab, by the discovery in 2009 that the top quark can be created without its antiparticle, and the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. These discoveries were the result of the collective effort of thousands of people supported by the taxpayers of the world. Let me raise a cheer to you; the hundreds of millions of hardworking people around the world without whose support none of these discoveries would have been possible. I am truly grateful for your generosity.
Which brings me to my day job: I'm an experimental particle physicist, who teaches at Florida State University. Since 2009, I have been a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration, which is based at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics.
To learn a bit about my research interests, click on the appropriate link to the left.
Below is a picture of the churchyard of the church in Soufrière, Dominica,
where yours truly was born on June 8th, 1956. I like this
picture a great deal because it reminds me that I came into
the world in a shack under a hot tin roof nestled in a
beautiful place overlooking the deep blue sea.
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What I try to do is to help each young person strive for excellence while maintaining a ferocious curiosity about the world. Research is not for everyone. It is mostly difficult, frustrating, and stressful. But, once in a while, it is exhilirating, euphoric, sublime. Being party to a discovery is a truly awesome experience and I have had the good fortune of experiencing the thrill of discovery four times: the 1979 discovery of the gluon at DESY, Hamburg, Germany; the 1995 discovery of the top quark at Fermilab, Batavia, USA, followed, at the same lab, by the discovery in 2009 that the top quark can be created without its antiparticle, and the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. These discoveries were the result of the collective effort of thousands of people supported by the taxpayers of the world. Let me raise a cheer to you; the hundreds of millions of hardworking people around the world without whose support none of these discoveries would have been possible. I am truly grateful for your generosity.
Which brings me to my day job: I'm an experimental particle physicist, who teaches at Florida State University. Since 2009, I have been a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration, which is based at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics.
To learn a bit about my research interests, click on the appropriate link to the left.
Below is a picture of the churchyard of the church in Soufrière, Dominica,
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