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Themistoklis Mastoridis Named Toohig Fellow

(Photo)
Toohig Fellow Themistoklis Mastoridis in the LHC control room. (Image courtesy Themistoklis Mastoridis.)

Congratulations to SLAC researcher Themistoklis Mastoridis, who has been named a Toohig Fellow by the LHC Accelerator Research Program. Along with this year's other Toohig Fellow, Simon White, who recently earned his doctorate from the University of Paris at Orsay, Mastoridis will receive funding to conduct postdoctoral research in accelerator science related to CERN's Large Hadron Collider for the next two to three years.

"This fellowship is very exciting," said Mastoridis, who completed his doctorate at SLAC last August. "It gives me a lot of freedom as to what I want to work on and who I get to work with. I look forward to working with the very bright people at SLAC, LBL [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] and CERN in the coming years."

Funded by the LHC Accelerator Research Program, or LARP, a collaborative initiative between the Department of Energy Office of Science's Division of High Energy Physics and DOE Office of Science laboratories, the fellowship is named in honor of the late physicist and Jesuit priest Timothy Toohig. According to the Toohig Fellowship Web site, Toohig "devoted his life to promoting accelerator science and increasing understanding, communication and collaboration among scientists of all nations and religions."

At SLAC, Mastoridis' research focused on systems governing the radio-frequency waves that give particles their boost inside an accelerator. Now, as the first SLAC Toohig Fellow, Mastoridis plans to continue his research into radio-frequency systems and their interaction with the particle beam, while expanding his work to also study the instabilities caused when an accelerator beam pipe becomes too clogged with electron "clouds."

"This is a new field for me, so I'll learn something for sure," he said. "I'll be able to use the skills I learned at SLAC during my Ph.D. work as well, so I think there are areas in which I can make contributions."

By splitting his time between SLAC, LBL and CERN, Mastoridis will not only be able to work on these two projects, but also plans to develop his skills on an LHC instrumentation project, although which project has not yet been defined.

"The Toohig Fellowship is such a unique opportunity," Mastoridis said. "The freedom and ability to collaborate with so many scientists and the opportunity to get more involved at CERN make it very exciting."

—Kelen Tuttle
  SLAC Today, November 1, 2010