Heidi Schellman, Author at Physics: Schellman Research Group

Brandon Walker graduated from Northwestern in 2010 with Bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Astronomy and in Mathematics. He did his honors thesis in the Schellman group on `An Algorithm for Particle Tracking and Analysis of Muons in the Main Injector Experiment v-A (MINERvA).”

He is currently a doctoral student in Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Brandon Walker (center) helps assemble the MINERvA detector 300 feet below Fermilab

For his PhD, he’s designing and building a modular multi-source electron beam scanner for high speed computed tomography and 3D printing applications. The system would enable ultra-fast CT scans for improved image quality in cardiac imaging and could be a game changer for 3D printing. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) has filed two patents for the project, one in 2014 and another in 2015 (patents pending).

He has also co-founded 2 startup companies. Formula Database, GelCombs and has his own consulting company that does quality assurance for radiation and diagnostic imaging products.

Cheryl Patrick got her undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Oxford and then worked as an IT consultant in the UK and Denmark before coming to Northwestern in 2010. She is measuring Quasi-Elastic Anti-neutrino Scattering in the MINERvA experiment for her thesis (expected this winter) and also keeps the data from MINERvA going to tape.

Cheryl, far right, wins a T-shirt for outstanding work at the NUSTEC Neutrino Generators Summer school in Liverpool - April 2014. — Cheryl, far right, wins a T-shirt for outstanding work at the NUSTEC Neutrino Generators Summer school in Liverpool – April 2014.

After 2 days battling a segfault in ROOT, Cheryl therapeutically flattens chicken breasts for dinner. — After 2 days battling a segfault in ROOT during a visit to Oregon State, Cheryl therapeutically flattens chicken breasts for dinner.

Dr Andrew Kobach MS-2011

Andrew Kobach received his Master’s degree with the Schellman group at Northwestern in 2011 for his measurement of Z+gamma production at the DO experiment at Fermilab. He received a Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Fellowship to support this work.

He recently completed his doctorate in Theoretical Physics with André de Gouvêa at Northwestern and will be taking a postdoctoral position at UC San Diego in Fall 2015.

Dr. Geralyn (Sam) Zeller – PhD 2002

Dr. Geralyn (Sam) Zeller received a Ph.D. in particle physics from Northwestern University working with Heidi Schellman and Kevin McFarland (Rochester) in 2002. Her dissertation, a measurement of the weak mixing angle in neutrino deep inelastic scattering, earned a Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation award in Experimental Particle Physics in 2003. She worked at both Columbia University and Los Alamos National Laboratory prior to becoming a staff scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 2009. She has participated in six different experiments studying the properties of neutrinos over the course of her career, including NuTeV, MiniBooNE, SciBooNE, MicroBooNE, ArgoNeuT, and DUNE. She recently received a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career award to further the research of using liquid argon time projection chambers to study neutrino interactions and is currently co-spokesperson for the MicroBooNE experiment.

Her current research focuses on neutrino-nucleus interactions and precision neutrino oscillation measurements.

Chris Marshall, a graduate student finishing his thesis at Rochester, was on the day shift today and contributed this screenshot from the Original UROC at Rochester.

A mosaic of the Rochester ROC – this was the Original ROC!

Emily Maher, a Physics Professor at MCLA, who was doing the night shift, has kindly documented the official setup in the Fermilab control room. This is on the MINERvA shift wiki but that makes it hard to post pictures so I’m reposting here.

Top 1: MINOS DCS status and MINOS Run Control

Top 2: Run Control and MINOS DAQ summary

The MINERvA experiment at Fermilab is currently running 24×7 in the NuMI neutrino beam.

We have set up a Remote Operations Center (UROC) at Oregon State where we can run remote shifts monitoring data acquisition and controlling data taking. This frees up the experts at Fermilab for emergency repairs.

The screen on the far left shows neutrino interactions as they are logged at Fermilab.

This is a picture of an anti-neutrino interaction in the MINERvA detector. The invisible neutrino entered from the left, hit a nucleus and produced a muon particle which exits to the right. The color scale of the far right shows the amount of energy deposited in each pixel of the detector. The detector is about 10 m long and 2 m across.

We are starting a neutrino physics group at Oregon State

Current members are:

Heidi Schellman – Professor

Gabriel Nowak – Undergraduate Researcher

Evan Peters – Undergraduate Researcher

Cheryl Patrick – Northwestern Graduate Student

Laura Fields – Northwestern postdoc

I found out at shift turnover that Chris M. at Rochester had diagnosed a problem using a screen I didn’t know about. So we agreed to document our displays to see if we’re looking at all the displays we need to look at.

Here is my general layout: