John Dowell

This article is about British physicist. For American printmaker, see John E. Dowell Jr.

John Dowell
Born6 January 1935
Alma mater
Employer
Awards
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John Derek Dowell FRS (born 6 January 1935) is a British physicist, emeritus professor at University of Birmingham.

Born in Leicestershire, he was educated at Coalville Grammar School and the University of Birmingham (BSc, PhD).[1]

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]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986[2] and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003.[3]

In July 2002, a symposium was held in his honour, as he retired in September of that year.[4]

  1. ^ a b Dowell, 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.
  2. ^ "John Dowell - Biography". Royal Society. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  3. ^ "APS Fellow Archive". APS. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  4. ^ "Symposium on High Energy Physics to mark the retirement of Professor John Dowell FRS". School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham. 3 July 2002. Retrieved 28 January 2017.