Profile
Anne Green
My CV
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Education:
Whitstone Community School (GCSEs 1985-1990),
Strode College (A levels, 1990-1992),
University of Oxford (Undergraduate, 1992-1995),
University of Sussex (Postgraduate, 1995-1998). -
Qualifications:
GCSEs: Maths, English Literature, English Language, Physics, Chemistry, History, Music, German.
A levels: Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Chemistry.
Degree: Physics.
DPhil/PhD: Astronomy. -
Work History:
As a Physicist: Queen Mary University of London, Stockholm University Sweden, University of Sussex, University of Sheffield. I’ve also had Summer/weekend jobs working in a cider bottling factory, waitressing and babysitting.
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Current Job:
Physics Professor
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About Me:
I’m an astroparticle physicist. I also enjoy running, travelling and playing the piano.
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I live in Chesterfield with my partner (who is also a Physicist), 2 rabbits and 1 dwarf Russian hamster. We enjoy travelling to interesting and unusual places, including North Korea. My other hobbies include running very long distances, doing yoga and playing the piano.
on holiday in Grand Teton National Park
Genghis the hamster
finishing a 250mile race
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By studying how stars & galaxies move, astronomers have worked out that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible and exotic, so called dark matter. Particle Physicists have some ideas about what the dark matter could be. For instance heavy particles, called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs for short. Or black holes made in the Big Bang.
I’m trying to work out how we can detect these objects and test these ideas using telescopes and particle physics experiments. I’m a theoretical physicist. I don’t do experiments myself, instead I do calculations (either with pen and paper or computers) to study what experiments should look for.
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My Typical Day:
Teaching, doing maths (either with a pen and paper or a computer), reading and replying to emails, going to meetings.
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As a professor my job involves doing lots of different things and really there’s no such thing as a typical day.
A big part of my job is teaching Physics. This includes lectures to large groups (100-200 students), small group tutorials and helping students working on research projects.
Another big part of my job is research. This involves reading papers other scientists have written about their research, coming up with ideas of new things to do, doing those things (sometimes on my own, sometimes with other people) and then writing my results up.
As a fairly senior scientist I also spending a lot of time doing things which are less fun, in particular committee meetings and lots of emails.
I also travel lots (in the UK and abroad) to give talks at conferences, work with other scientists and attend (even more…) committee meetings.
My office
Lecturing
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Cosmology masterclasses for school students
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The most exciting thing that's happened this year in my research area:
Most progress in science doesn’t come from big break-throughs, but from careful work over many years by lots of people. One of the hottest topics in cosmology at the moment is measuring the expansion speed of the Universe. There are 2 ways of doing this and they give different answers. And at the moment we don’t know whether there’s a small mistake in one of the methods, or whether this is telling us something new and exciting about the Universe.
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My latest work:
I’m trying to understand what dark matter is. This invisible, exotic stuff makes up 84% of the matter in the Universe. Currently I’m mostly working on testing the idea that dark matter is primordial black holes, black holes that were made in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
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My favourite misconception about my area of science:
That cosmology is more like science fiction than science! Cosmologists don’t just sit around dreaming up wild ideas. Our understanding of what the Universe is made of is based on observational data.