Andy Parker is the Director of the Cambridge eScience Centre and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of CancerGrid
Andy Parker is a Professor of High Energy Physics, with over 100 publications on aspects of particle physics. His current research interests involve experiments to reveal new physics such as extra space dimensions and quantum-sized black holes.
As Director of the Cambridge eScience Centre, he is responsible for grid computing initiatives across the University, covering a wide variety of projects in life sciences, earth sciences, medicine, chemistry and engineering, all requiring the sharing of large computational and data resources. He sits on the Management Committees of the National Institute of Environmental eScience, the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute, the Cambridge-Cranfield High Performance Computing Facility, and the CamGrid project.
He has been a leader of the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider, due to begin operations at CERN in Geneva in 2007. This machine will be the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, and will generate a Petabyte of data each year, to be analysed by the 150 collaborating institutes. As a member of the ATLAS Executive Board, Prof Parker was for 6 years the Project Leader for the ATLAS Inner Detector, the most complex tracking detector constructed at CERN to date, with overall responsibility for all aspects of its design and construction, including its software systems. The construction team contained over 50 partners worldwide, with extensive use of collaborative tools, especially video conferencing technologies.
Prior to this, Prof Parker was a CERN Fellow and Staff member, and was Software Coordinator for several CERN experiments. He has long experience of distributed computing. He was responsible for all aspects of the software of the UA2 experiment at the CERN proton-antiproton collider in the 1980s, and was at the time the highest rate and data volume accelerator.
He holds a PhD from the University of London, and an MA from Oxford. He is a Professorial Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was awarded the Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching in 1997.