TRIUMF Undergrads Awarded at CUPC

Three TRIUMF co-operative education students were delighted when they took home awards for their presentations in the Particle and Nuclear Physics division at the annual Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference, hosted by McMaster University this past October. Sebastien Rettie, Chelsea Dunning and Ben Davis-Purcell took the top three prizes for outstanding presentations based on their research at TRIUMF this year. Other presentations at the conference covered engineering physics, astrophysics, condensed matter physics (quantum and soft), biophysics, mathematical and theoretical physics and medical physics.

Chelsea Dunning is a co-operative education student from the University of British Columbia, supervised by Dr. Mike Trinczek. Chelsea's presentation, "TRIUMF's Proton and Neutron Irradiation Facility (PIF & NIF) and the Two-Step Monte Carlo Simulation", showcased the simulation of neutron flux at PIF & NIF and earned her the third place prize. Over the course of her time at TRIUMF, Chelsea has worked on three different projects—PIF&NIF, radiation safety and health physics, confirming her interest in pursuing graduate studies in medical physics. Chelsea honed her skills in presenting through this summer's TRIUMF presentation skills workshop, which gave her the opportunity to practice in front of an audience and gain confidence for presenting.

Ben Davis-Purcell co-chaired the CUPC conference with a team of McMaster students, and presented his second-place talk on his research under Dr. Rich Helmer on "Neck Optics Tuning of the SNO+ Experiment". Over the course of his term at TRIUMF and SNOLAB, Ben worked on updating the neck material in the SNO+ simulation package in order to more accurately reconstruct the energies of neutrino events that pass through the neck of the detector.

Sebastien Rettie's presentation on "Searching for Supersymmetry(SUSY) with the Upgraded ATLAS Detector" won first place, surely making his supervisor, Dr. Anadi Canepa, proud. Sebastien was one of a small handful of students selected to study jointly in Canada and at CERN this summer through a program in collaboration with the Institute of Particle Physics. Having completed two prior co-op terms at TRIUMF, he credits his experience here with helping him to decide to pursue graduate studies in experimental particle physics.

For now,  Sebastien and Ben have returned to classes for the completion of their undergrads while Chelsea is busy completing another project for her one-year co-op term. We can't wait to see how far they'll go! Congratulations to all! 

Photo left to right: Chelsea Dunning, Ben Davis-Purcell, Sebastien Rettie. Credit: CUPC 2013

--Ariane Madden, TRIUMF Communications Assistant