Profile
Philippe Gambron
My CV
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Education:
I have a master in physics from the University of Liège, in Belgium
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Work History:
I have held several jobs involving maths and scientific programming. But I have also had truly terrible ones. The important is to hang on and try to steer the boat in the direction where we would like it to go.
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Current Job:
Computational scientist
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About Me:
I’m a physicist from Belgium employed at STFC near Oxford.
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I am physicist. I came from Belgium 5 years ago and I live close to Oxford. Besides physics, I enjoy tennis, photography and listening to progressive rock. I also like cooking and mobster movies.
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I work on a combination of applied mathematics and high performance computing. Basically, this amounts to making calculations on some of the world’s largest computers.
This has led me to making simulations of waves crashing on an offshore rig or the airflow around a speeding car for example. I have also been involved in genetics where we tried to understand the origin of some diseases by digging into huge heaps of data. Finally, I am also trying, within my work, to come back to cosmology and particle physics which is my passion as well as my background.
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My Typical Day:
Doing calculations or programming
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I am not at all involved in fancy experiments using huge and impressive apparatus with lots of pipes, blinking lights and wires dangling. I mostly sit at a desk, doing calculations on a sheet of paper or writing code that is going to compute the answer.
Nevertheless this can be exhilarating when we realise that our calculations can reproduce or help us understand something we observe.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Buy a small telescope
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The most exciting thing that's happened this year in my research area:
I think the most interesting recent development has been the detection of gravitational waves from black hole mergers. It is not particle physics but that kind of observations could become relevant for cosmology which, in turn, would enable us to test new developments in particle physics.
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My latest work:
My background is in particle physics and I am trying to pursue it on the side but, at the moment, I am working in high performance computing.
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My favourite misconception about my area of science:
A huge disappointment has been the failure of our attempts to go beyond the Standard Model. Certain patterns in particle physics are tantalising but we can’t make sense of them. Many things have been tried to understand why particle physics is the way it is and I used to find that fascinating. Unfortunately we have not had much success.