Robin Newhouse
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
-R.W. Emmerson
About me
Hello! My name is Robin Newhouse. I am a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I smash particles together faster than ever before and look at the weird stuff that comes out.
My journey in academia has been a delight. It's taken me to many places and taught me many things. And now it's time to move on. I am looking for an organization that will benefit from my expertise in distilling powerful insights from big data. My extensive experience in building software, applying AI systems, and communicating complex ideas has prepared me to make impactful contributions to the pressing challenges of our modern world.
My work in ATLAS
I am currently doing research with the ATLAS experiment at CERN where the highest energy particle collisions ever achieved are analyzed in the search for new physics. Exploring science at the energy frontier requires powerful computing and cutting-edge technologies.
My main work is a physics analysis that searches for evidence of heavy neutral leptons (e.g. sterile neutrinos) that could answer some major questions about dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry, and neutrino masses. Our recent publication can be found here!
In the area of detector performance, I work on the identification of Lorentz-boosted hadronic decays (aka. boosted jet tagging), and on the reconstruction of charged particles in the ATLAS Inner Detector (aka. tracking). Most of my work in performance has studied the use of machine learning techniques, like deep neural networks, in event reconstruction. Our team's work recently received an ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Award!
Education and interests
I received a BSc in Astronomy with a minor in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. Throughout my degree, I worked as an undergraduate researcher at the UBC Software Practices Lab, The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Institute, and Canada's particle accelerator centre TRIUMF.
I will be graduating in Spring 2022 with a PhD in Physics. My focus is High Energy Particle Physics, in particular, searching for evidence of heavy neutral leptons at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
It's been a dream of mine to work at CERN and study the fundamentals of our universe since my first science class in 7th grade. It is an honour to work with the brilliant scientists and engineers at CERN as we probe the highest-energy frontier of physics.
I am always interested in opportunities for science outreach and communication. For several years I have been part of a mobile astronomical observatory project, the Black Rock Observatory.
If you would like to know more about my research, or just want to talk about the universe, please feel free to reach out by email at robin.newhouse@gmail.com.