Academic staff

Prof.  Francesca Di Lodovico

Professor Di Lodovico is an internationally renowned physicist. She graduated from the University La Sapienza, Rome, and got her PhD at ETH/Zurich, working on the Higgs boson and SUSY searches at LEP-2. She then changed area of interest moving to b-physics at the B-Factory BaBar at SLAC for her postdoc, first at the University of Edinburgh and then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was awarded a lectureship at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in 2004, and established a neutrino physics group. She was awarded the 2007 ERC starting grant for her work on T2K. She was awarded a professorship within 8 years and was head of the Particle Physics Research Centre (PPRC) at QMUL. She is one of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Laureates. She moved to King’s College of London in 2019 to establish the Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (EPAP) group in the Department of Physics.

Dr.  Jeanne Wilson

Jeanne Wilson is an established researcher in the field of experimental neutrino physics. She graduated from the University of Sheffield with an MPhys in Physics and Astronomy and completed her PhD research at the University of Oxford on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, producing the first energy spectrum of 8B solar neutrinos. She held a PPARC post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Sussex on the COBRA experiment, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford on the SNO+ experiment, both in the field of neutrino less double beta decay. From 2010-2019 she was a Senior Lecturer and Reader at Queen Mary University of London working on the T2K, SNO+ and Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino experiments. She joined King’s College in 2019 to help establish the new Experimental Particle Physics group, bringing her research on SNO+, T2K and Hyper-K.

Dr.  Teppei Katori

Teppei Katori is an experimental particle physicist. He obtained his BSc at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Dr Katori obtained his PhD at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. There he worked on the MiniBooNE and SciBooNE experiments under Prof. Rex Tayloe. Dr Katori did his postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, working on the MicroBooNE experiment within Prof. Janet Conrad’s group. Dr Katori was appointed as a lecturer of Queen Mary University of London, UK. In 2019, he moved to King’s College London, UK. Dr Katori is a recipient of the 2012 IUPAP (International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) C11 young scientist prize and the 2013 APS (American Physical Society) Henry Primakoff award.

Postdoctoral Research Associates

Dr. Sophie King

I am a Research Associate working on the T2K and Hyper-K experiments; currently at King’s College London and previously at Queen Mary University of London. I focus on neutrino interactions with matter, how we measure these with our detectors and the inherent systematic uncertainty associated with modelling this. I also work with Grid and Cloud computing, primarily for the purpose of Monte Carlo simulations of neutrino interactions within our detectors.
I did my PhD joint between Queen Mary University of London in experimental particle physics, also on T2K,  and the University of Southampton in theoretical physics where I focused on Leptogenesis as a mechanism to explain the matter-antimatter asymmtry of the universe.

Dr. Jost Migenda

Jost Migenda is a Research Associate in the Experimental Particle & Astroparticle Physics group at King’s College London. After graduating from TU Munich with an MSc in Nuclear, Particle and Astrophysics, they did their PhD at the University of Sheffield, investigating Hyper-Kamiokande’s ability to distinguish between different computer simulations of supernovae. For this work, they received the IOP Astroparticle Physics Thesis Prize 2020.

At King’s, Jost works on astrophysics and DAQ development for Hyper-Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande. They also lead the Detector Response group of the Supernova Early Warning System SNEWS—a collaboration of neutrino detectors around the world that aims to provide an early warning to astronomers when the next galactic supernova is coming. Jost also organizes the EPAP seminar series.

Outside of work, they enjoy physics outreach, languages and way too many podcasts.

Dr. Mahdi Taani

 Mahdi Taani is a research associate in the Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (EPAP) group at King’s College London. He graduated from Queen Mary University of London with an MSci in Theoretical Physics. Mahdi then worked on the design of the Hyper-Kamiokande outer detector and searches for non-standard neutrino interactions in atmospheric neutrinos in Super-Kamiokande; this work earned him a PhD from University of Edinburgh and Nagoya University. At King’s, he is currently working on the development and testing of hardware/software for the Hyper-Kamiokande outer detector. He is also working on sensitivity calculations for the future Hyper-Kamiokande experiment.




Stephane Zoldos

 Stephane is a Marie Curie Fellow working on the Hyper-K, Super-K, and T2K experiments, based at King’s College London and Kavli IPMU in Tokyo. His interests lie in both hardware development and physics of neutrino interaction inside water-Cherenkov detectors: from the characterization of photodetectors (PMTs but also new technologies like large-area picosecond photodetectors – LAPPDs) to the extraction of the neutrino oscillation parameters from various sources. His Fellowship is dedicated to the improved design and construction of the Hyper-K Outer Detector, an effort led by the Hyper-K UK collaboration, from what we learned working on Super-K data. He also focuses on a joint fit between T2K and Super-K of the neutrino atmospheric parameters.

PhD Students

Joanna Gao

Joanna Gao is a second-year PhD student working in the Super-Kamiokande (SK) and Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) collaborations. Her main area of research is twofold: with SK, she is working to single out events which have Michel electrons appearing in the outer detector (OD) region as part of the OD calibration effort; with HK, she is exploring the possibility of detecting neutrinos with ~10e12 eV (~TeV) energy originated from the opposite side of the Earth to the HK detector location. 

Joanna has obtained an MSci degree in theoretical physics from Imperial College. Her master’s thesis is of the title Developing Machine Learning Techniques for Simplified Template Cross Section in the Higgs Boson to Diphoton Decay Channel at CMS. A copy of the thesis can be found on her LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannagao/

Rogan Clark

Rogan is a first year PhD student, currently associated with the IceCube experiment. They are currently working on finding coincident astrophysical particle events between the IceCube neutrino detector, and the DM-Ice muon detector in the period 2012 and 2020. They gained their MPhys in Physics from Oxford University, with their Masters’ thesis being on Convolutional Neural Networks for isolating muon events on the Cherenkov Telescope Array.

Zhenxiong Xie

Zhenxiong Xie is a first year PhD student working in Osc++ framework in Hyper-K which is a bundle of computational and plotting utilities helpful to assess the sensitivity of a future experiment like HK to neutrino oscillation parameters. She got her bachelor degree in Physics at Sun Yat-sen University in Canton, China.

Andres Lopez Moreno

Andres is a first year PhD student working with the T2K and SK collaborations. He is currently exploring different ways of parametrising the amount of CP violation in the neutrino sector at the Oscillation Analysis group. He is particularly interested in how unitarity constraints might be used to improve our sensitivity for the Jarlskog Invariant. Andres got his MSci in Mathematics and Physics at the university of Bath, with a special interest in functional analysis, algebra and topology. His master thesis was on explaining the evolution of galaxy cluster cores by studying their Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs).

Ewan Miller

   
Ewan is a first year PhD student working with the T2K and Hyper-K collaborations. For Hyper-K his work focuses on the outer veto detector, performing simulations to inform the final design of this detector component. For T2K, he is working to improve the treatment of detector systematic uncertainties in the oscillation fitting framework, which should ultimately improve sensitivity to the neutrino oscillation parameters including delta-CP. Ewan got his MSci degree from the University of Edinburgh.


Zhengyuan Shan

 


George Burton

George is a first year PhD student working with both the Super-K and Hyper-K collaborations. For Hyper-K his work focuses on development of the hardware and software of the outer veto detector, specifically the clustering algorithm for incoming particles. For Super-K, his work focuses on analysis of neutrino oscillation data, and improving the constraints of CP violating parameters. George completed his MSci degree, also at King’s College London.

Research interests:
· Neutrino Oscillations
· Machine Learning
· Water Cherenkov Detectors
· CP Violation
· Cosmic Ray Physics

Nahid Bhuiyan


Nahid is a PhD student working on the characterisation of neutrons in spallation sources and the Super-K and Hyper-K neutrino experiments.

His research methods involve fast neutron activation and proton recoil to study the neutron fluxes at the ISIS Neutron Source.

Using these techniques, he is designing an experiment to study the propagation of neutrons in water to better understand neutron multiplicities due to inelastic scattering.