Valerie Gibson | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Education | University of Sheffield, University of Oxford |
| Known for | LHCb experiment, CP violation |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | High Energy Physics |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge, CERN |
| Website | https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/gibsonv |
| Notes | |
Occupation: Professor of High Energy Physics | |
Valerie Gibson OBE , also known as Val Gibson, is an Emeritus Professor of Physics and former Head of the High Energy Physics group of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
Gibson completed a bachelor's degree in Physics at the University of Sheffield in 1983. [1] She achieved a DPhil in experimental particle physics in 1986 from The Queen's College, Oxford.
In 1987 she became a fellow in the Experimental Physics Division at CERN. She joined the Cavendish Laboratory in 1989 on a five-year SERC Advanced Fellowship. [2] In 1989 she also received a Stokes Senior Research Fellowship at Pembroke College. [2] She was appointed as University Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College in 1994. She was awarded a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Fellowship in 2007. [3] Gibson was appointed Professor in 2009, appointed Head of the High Energy Physics Group in the Cavendish Laboratory from 2013 until her retirement in 2023. [4]
She began work on the Muon Scattering Experiment at Paul Scherrer Institute. She has worked on the LHCb experiment since the first beam of particles were injected into the Large Hadron Collider in 2008. [5] Gibson has overall responsibility for data acquisition from the ring imaging Cherenkov detectors. [6] Gibson was the UK spokesperson for the LHCb experiment between 2004 and 2008. [7] [2] Today she is chair of the LHCb Collaboration Board and lead of the University of Cambridge's LHCb team. [8] [9] Gibson was part of the discovery of CP violation in the Kaon system. [10]
Gibson is a keen science communicator, interested in taking science to a wider range of audiences. She regularly discusses particle physics discoveries in the media. [11] She developed the card game Hunt the Higgs and has acted as an adviser for exhibitions at the Science Museum. [12] [13] She is a patron of the Gravity Fields Festival. [14] Alongside her research group, Gibson exhibited at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. [15]
Gibson has spent her career championing women in science. [10] She believes it is her duty "to encourage younger women in their careers and say ‘it is possible’". [16] She has been part of the University of Cambridge's Athena SWAN and Project Juno committees. [17] In 2014, the University of Cambridge were awarded the first gold Athena SWAN award. [18] [19] She won the WISE Campaign Leader Award in 2013. [20] She is chair of the Institute of Physics Juno panel. [21] In 2016 she launched a three-day residential program for young women interested in physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. [22] In 2016 she won a Royal Society Athena Prize for increasing gender diversity in mathematics, having been nominated by the Institute of Physics. [23] [24] [25] [26] She was a keynote speaker at the 2018 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics. [27]
Gibson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to science, women in science and public engagement. [28]
The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named after the British chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish. The laboratory has had a huge influence on research in the disciplines of physics and biology.
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Tara Georgina Shears is a Professor of Physics at the University of Liverpool.
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Suchitra Sebastian is a condensed matter physicist at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. She is known for her discoveries of exotic quantum phenomena that emerge in complex materials. In particular, she is known for the discovery of unconventional insulating materials which display simultaneous conduction-like behaviour. In 2022 she was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize by the Breakthrough Foundation. She was named as one of thirty Exceptional Young Scientists by the World Economic Forum in 2013, one of The Next Big Names in Physics by the Financial Times in 2013, and spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2016.
Michael Andrew Parker is a British physicist and is professor of high energy physics at the University of Cambridge. He is the incumbent Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, having succeeded Bridget Kendall in 2023. Parker is involved with CERN's Large Hadron Collider project, and was previously the head of the department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, the Cavendish Laboratory.
Hiranya Vajramani Peiris is a British astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, where she holds the Professorship of Astrophysics (1909). She is best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation, and interdisciplinary links between cosmology and high-energy physics. She was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their "detailed maps of the early universe."
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Mark Thomson is a British particle physicist. He is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Since January 2018, he has been the Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, one of the nine councils of UK Research and Innovation. Thomson is a delegate of the United Kingdom to CERN Council, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) and European Spallation Source ERIC (ESS).
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Ruth Cameron FInstP FIOM3 FREng is a British materials scientist and professor at the University of Cambridge. She is co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Medical Materials, where she studies materials that interact therapeutically with the body. Since October 2020 she has been joint head of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge.
Catherine Ann Hobbs is a British mathematician and educator working as a professor and Academic Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing at Coventry University. Her research focuses on applications of singularity theory to the physical sciences. She has a strong interest in science policy, particularly relating to encouraging and supporting women in STEM fields.
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Tuomas Knowles is a British scientist and Professor of Physical Chemistry and Biophysics at the Department of Chemistry and at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He is the co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. Prof. Knowles is a co-founder of four biotechnology companies: Fluidic Analytics, Wren Therapeutics, Xampla and Transition Bio. He was also the Cambridge Enterprise Academic Entrepreneur of the year in 2019.
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