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Dr. Dugan O'NeilOne of the top young scientists in particle physics in the US and Canada, Dr. Dugan O'Neil, Assistant Professor of Physics at SFU, has pioneered a new technique in his field and made one of the most important measurements in the scientific program at the The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. His accomplishments include making SFU the first Canadian institution admitted into to the DZero collaboration, which involves approximately 600 physicists from 19 countries. He has brought worldwide attention to British Columbia through his leadership of SFU's high-energy particle physics research group credited for detecting an elusive subatomic particle: the single top quark. It was Dr. O'Neil who first introduced the use of Boosted Decision Trees, a machine-learning technique which is "trained" on simulated signal and background event samples. The trees are then applied to the real collision events to try to separate signal from real background. Dr. O'Neil adapted this technique to successfully extract the single top "signal", ending a twelve year international effort. This work is seen as a major stepping stone towards discovery of the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics and the particle that gives mass to all others. After an intense period of internal reviews in fall 2006, Dr. O'Neil was selected by his collaboration to present the results to the world first at a seminar at Fermilab on December 8th, 2006. |
