James Lewis Pinfold (born 1950 in Ealing,

West London West London is the western part of London, England, north of the River Thames, west of the City of London, and extending to the Greater London boundary. The term is used to differentiate the area from the other parts of London: North Londo ...

) is a British-Canadian physicist, specializing in

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...

Education and career

Pinfold graduated in physics in 1972 with a B.Sc. from

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

and in 1977 with a Ph.D. from the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

. His Ph.D. thesis was on weak neutral currents, stemming from his work as part of the

Gargamelle Gargamelle was a heavy liquid bubble chamber detector in operation at CERN between 1970 and 1979. It was designed to detect neutrinos and antineutrinos, which were produced with a beam from the Proton Synchrotron (PS) between 1970 and 1976, ...

discovery team. From 1977 to 1989 he held research assistant and senior research assistant positions at CERN (near

Geneva , neighboring_municipalities= Carouge, Chêne-Bougeries, Cologny, Lancy, Grand-Saconnex, Pregny-Chambésy, Vernier, Veyrier , website = https://www.geneve.ch/ Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevr ...

) and

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been opera ...

(near

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

). From 1989 to 1992 he was an associate professor at the

Weizmann Institute of Science The Weizmann Institute of Science ( he, מכון ויצמן למדע ''Machon Vaitzman LeMada'') is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli unive ...

. At the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

, he was from 1992 to 1996 an associate professor and from 1996 to 2016 a full professor, and he is since 2016 a distinguished university professor. From 1995 to 2004 he was the University of Alberta's Centre for Subatomic Research (renamed in 2006 the Centre for Particle Physics). Since 2005 he has held a visiting professorship at King's College London. He frequently travels back and forth between the University of Alberta and CERN in Geneva. He is the author or co-author of over 1250 citable publications and has given over 220 invited talks. Pinfold was from 1988 to 1989 the spokesperson for CERN's WA88 experiment. From 1987 to 1992 he was the spokesperson for the MODAL experiment at CERN's Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP). He was one of the founders in the 1990s of the

ATLAS experiment ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of ...

involved in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovery of the Higgs boson. From 2000 to 2002 he was the deputy spokesperson for ATLAS-Canada. Since 2000 he is the leader and spokesperson for the

MoEDAL experiment MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC) is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Experiment MoEDAL shares the cavern at Point 8 with LHCb, and its prime goal is to directly search for the magnetic monopole (M ...

. From 2004 to 2010 he was the deputy co-spokesperson for the SLIM experiment. In 2007, he won an award from ASTech (Alberta Science & Technology Leadership Foundation) for his leadership in starting the Alberta Large-area Time-coincidence Array, or ALTA, Project. This educational and research project "involves spreading out many cosmic-ray detectors over vast areas, connecting them through the Internet, and synchronising their readings with an integrated GPS system. Most of the detectors are run by high school students". In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). In 2018 he received the

Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize The Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize was established according to the will of Dorothy J. Killam to honour the memory of her husband Izaak Walton Killam. Five Killam Prizes, each having a value of $100,000, are annually awarded by the Canada Cou ...

Selected publications

* 1973 * * * * * * * *

References

External links

* (MoEDAL experiment spokesperson James Pinfold) * {{DEFAULTSORT:Pinfold, James 1950 births Living people Alumni of Imperial College London Alumni of the University of London University of Alberta faculty 20th-century British physicists 21st-century British physicists 20th-century Canadian physicists 21st-century Canadian physicists Particle physicists People associated with CERN Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada