Quantum Diaries

I am an Assistant Professor at New York University and a member of the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics. I'm a member of the ATLAS Collaboration, though much of my work applies more broadly and I dabble in some other experiments.

My primary research focus has been the search for the Higgs boson -- in both standard and non-standard scenarios. My other major focus is the high-level strategical approach for searches for new physics including statistical methods, presentation of results, new forms of publishing, data preservation, and analysis reinterpretation. I like to think I've hedged my bets for the LHC.

I grew up in Arkansas, a small rural state in the U.S. that is often ranked near the bottom in math and science education. Luckily, Bill Clinton helped to form a state-wide math and science school while he was the Governor there. I had a Russian theoretical physicist with a Ph.D. as my first physics teacher, and that changed my trajectory.

I went to Rice University as an undergraduate, majoring in physics and mathematics. Like so many students I had a hard time choosing between theoretical and experimental physics. One early morning shortly before graduation I received a phone call from Prof. Sau Lan Wu, who invited me to join her group on the ALEPH experiment at CERN. I moved out to CERN during the last year that CERN's LEP collider was running. Shortly after I arrived there was a lot of excitement because an excess of events was showing up in the searches for the Higgs. This excitement convinced me that I wanted to be close to the data.

During my graduate studies in Madison Wisconsin and at CERN I worked with Dieter Zeppenfeld, a theorist, to develop some of the tools that we used within ATLAS and CMS to establish a new way to search for the Higgs boson at the LHC. From there I moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory where I continued preparing for LHC Higgs searches and working on the `trigger' algorithms relevant for searches for supersymmetry. In the summer of 2007, I joined New York University, turned 30, and became a father.

I live in Greenwich Village in New York with my wife and two beautiful children. I love music and food and I try (mainly unsuccessfully) to find time for my old hobbies like percussion, capoeira, dancing, hiking, and stargazing. I keep a personal blog, and you can follow me on Twitter, @KyleCranmer.