I have just spend the last couple of days in Newport News, Virginia, USA. I'm here, because it's where Jefferson Lab is. Jefferson Lab is a major nuclear physics research facility in which electrons are accelerated to very high energies and smashed into nuclear targets to understand in particular the quark-gluon structure of protons and neutrons, though there are other physics goals too.
My University has a master's student, Rocco, on placement there, working with Jerry Gilfoyle from the University of Richmond who has kindly taken Rocco on as a salaried researcher for 10 months to help develop new algorithms to help disentangle real signals coming out of the complex detector system from the noisy background.
As part of the scheme where we (University of Surrey) send student on placements, we also make a couple of visits during the year. I made the first as a virtual visit, and make the second one, this week, in person. After the visit, Rocco, Jerry and I met in the centre of Newport News for dinner. Here's a picture of Rocco by the fountains in downtown:
I also used the fact I was at the Lab to meet the new deputy director for scientific, David Dean. I know David from my PhD days when I spent quite a bit of time at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. David was there at the time, and was a kind of surrogate supervisor for a time. It was nice to catch up with him. I didn't take a picture of him, so I can't post one here, but one day when I go through my old photographs of the time, I might be able to dig one out and post it to the blog.
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