Becky Parker | |
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 Becky Parker (right) receiving the Patrick Moore Medal in 2012 | |
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Becky Parker MBE HonFInstP is a British physicist and physics teacher based in Kent. She is a visiting professor at School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London.
Parker obtained a physics degree at the University of Sussex in 1980 [1] before moving to Chicago to complete as Borg Warner Fellow for the MA in Conceptual Foundations of Science. [2] She worked in the group of Bob Geroch, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar attending one of her seminars. [3]
Whilst studying at Chicago, Parker was dismayed at the lack of women in physics. [3] After enjoying a summer working at Adler Planetarium, she returned to the University of Sussex to complete a PGCE in order to encourage more school girls to study it. [4]
Parker was head of physics at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury, Kent, which accepts girls at sixth form. At the time Parker taught there, it was estimated that 2% of female physicists at University across the UK had attended the school. [5] From 2002 to 2005, she was a senior lecturer in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Kent in Canterbury, and was also the Schools first Outreach officer, responsible for pioneering its outreach program at a time when Physics and Chemistry undergraduate intake was declining across the UK university sector as a whole, and outreach and public engagement were the exception rather than the rule. She has since acted as an advisor for museums, exam boards and educational committees. [6] [7] In 2010, Parker was listed by the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) campaign as a 'female Brian Cox'. [8]
In 2014 Parker was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Institute of Physics for her contributions to physics education. [5]
Parker's interest in school research began in 2007 during a school trip to CERN, when her students were inspired to enter a Surrey Satellite Technology competition to design a space experiment. [9] [10] After many successful research projects in the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, Parker opened The Langton Star Centre. [11]
The Institute for Research in Schools, a national charitable organisation supporting students and teachers to engage in collaborative, authentic research across a range of scientific disciplines was officially launched in March 2016 by Parker. [12] She realised during her own academic career that more school children should be involved in scientific research, with young people being given credit for how innovative and intelligent they are. [4]
What began as an astrophysics project, with school groups using the Faulkes Telescope to make their own astrophysical observations, became something much more elaborate. Today a flagship IRIS projected allows school students to collaborate with CERN (CERN @ School), supported by the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Institute of Physics and SEPnet. Dr Jonathan Eastwood of Imperial College London described a new style cosmic ray detector designed by school students as the "UK's latest space facility". [13] [14] To build the detector, Parker raised in excess of £60,000, using initial funds from the British National Space Centre. [15] [16] NASA were so interested in the detector that they took several up to the International Space Station. [17] [18] [19] Data were collected, analysed and processed by students who were sitting their GCSEs. [20] "Genomic Decoders", launched in partnership with the Wellcome Genome Campus, focuses on the first ever annotation of the parasitic human whipworm genome. [21]
Since its launch, IRIS has expanded, providing several genuine research opportunities for school students. [2] Since its launch, IRIS has since received considerable media attention, and Parker's former role as Director. [22] [23] [24] [25] It was given as evidence for the 2017 House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee report on Science Communication and Engagement. [26]
The University of Sussex is a public research university located in Falmer, East Sussex, England. It lies mostly within the city boundaries of Brighton and Hove. Its large campus site is surrounded by the South Downs National Park, and provides convenient access to central Brighton 5.5 kilometres (3.4 mi) away. The university received its royal charter in August 1961, the first of the plate glass university generation.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border. It comprises 23 member states. Israel, admitted in 2013, is the only non-European full member. CERN is an official United Nations General Assembly observer.
The UA1 experiment was a high-energy physics experiment that ran at CERN's Proton-Antiproton Collider, a modification of the one-beam Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). The data was recorded between 1981 and 1990. The joint discovery of the W and Z bosons by this experiment and the UA2 experiment in 1983 led to the Nobel Prize for physics being awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984. Peter Kalmus and John Dowell, from the UK groups working on the project, were jointly awarded the 1988 Rutherford Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for their outstanding roles in the discovery of the W and Z particles.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is a particle physics experiment module that is mounted on the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment is a recognized CERN experiment (RE1). The module is a detector that measures antimatter in cosmic rays; this information is needed to understand the formation of the universe and search for evidence of dark matter.
Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys is an 11–18 foundation grammar school for boys and mixed sixth form in Canterbury, Kent, England. It was established in 1881.
George Ernest Kalmus, CBE, FRS is a noted British particle physicist.
Ishfaq Ahmad KhanSI, HI, NI, FPAS, was a Pakistani nuclear physicist, emeritus professor of high-energy physics at the National Centre for Physics, and former science advisor to the Government of Pakistan.
Brian Edward Cox is an English physicist and musician who is a professor of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester and the Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science. He is best known to the public as the presenter of science programmes, especially BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage and the Wonders of... series and for popular science books, such as Why Does E=mc2? and The Quantum Universe.
Arthur Bruce McDonald, P.Eng is a Canadian astrophysicist. McDonald is the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration and held the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 2006 to 2013. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita.
Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian experimental particle physicist who is the current and first woman Director-General at CERN in Switzerland. Her first mandate began on 1 January 2016 and ran for a period of five years. At its 195th Session in 2019, the CERN Council selected Gianotti for a second term as Director-General. Her second five-year term began on 1 January 2021 and goes on until 2025. This is the first time in CERN's history that a Director-General has been appointed for a full second term.
LUCID is a cosmic ray detector built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd and designed at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, in Canterbury, England. Its main purpose is to monitor cosmic rays using technology developed by CERN, and will help predict the occurrence of solar flares which disrupt artificial satellites. LUCID was launched on 8 July 2014 at Baikonur, Kazakhstan as an instrument of the satellite TechDemoSat-1, which was carried into space by a Soyuz-2 rocket.
David George Charlton is Professor of Particle Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, UK. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Prior to becoming Spokesperson, he was Deputy Spokesperson for four years, and before that Physics Coordinator of ATLAS in the run-up to the start of collision data-taking.
Peter Ignaz Paul Kalmus, is a British particle physicist, and emeritus professor of physics at Queen Mary, University of London.
Paolo Giubellino is an experimental particle physicist working on High-Energy Nuclear Collisions. Currently he is the joint Scientific Managing Director of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) and the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) and Professor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.
Jonathan Mark Butterworth is a Professor of Physics at University College London (UCL) working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). His popular science book Smashing Physics, which tells the story of the search for the Higgs boson, was published in 2014 and his newspaper column / blog Life and Physics is published by The Guardian.
Roma Agrawal is an Indian-British chartered structural engineer based in London. She has worked on several major engineering projects, including the Shard. Agrawal is also an author and a diversity campaigner, championing women in engineering.
Sheila Rowan is a Scottish physicist and academic, who is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and director of its Institute for Gravitational Research since 2009. She is known for her work in advancing the detection of gravitation waves. In 2016, Rowan was appointed the (part-time) Chief Scientific Advisor to the Scottish Government.
Antonella De Santo is an Italian and British Professor of Experimental Physics and works on the ATLAS experiment. She was the first woman in the Department of Physics at the University of Sussex to be made a professor.
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