He worked as a Research fellow at Birmingham University (1958-1960) before moving to be a research associate at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva (1960-1962}. He then returned to Birmingham as lecturer (1962-1970), senior lecturer (1970-1974) and reader (1974-1980). In 1980 he was appointed Professor of Elementary Particle Physics and finally retired as professor emeritus in 2002.[citation needed]
He published results from CERN’s SPS accelerator which included the first observation in Europe of the J/psi particle, which consists of charmed quarks, supporting the theory that matter is composed of quarks. After research at the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) at DESY in Hamburg, he helped develop detectors for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva and was involved in the ATLAS experiment which discovered the Higgs boson. He won the 1988 Rutherford Medal and Prize.[1]
In July 2002, a symposium was held in his honour, as he retired in September of that year.[4]
References
^ abDowell, Prof. John Derek, (born 6 Jan. 1935), Poynting Professor of Physics, University of Birmingham, 1997–2002, now Emeritus | WHO'S WHO & WHO WAS WHO. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.14040.