Stephen graduated with a first-class bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Liverpool, where his final year thesis focused on the possibility of making precision measurements of the rare Higgs to two muons decay at the Future Circular Electron Positron Collider (FCC-ee). When he isn’t in the lab, you can find Stephen lifting weights or chomping biscuits. Stephen has also worked with ATLAS on two different summer internships, the first in 2023 with LIP Lisbon where he investigated Higgs boson decays to ZZ*; and then in 2024 as part of the CERN Summer internship where he worked with the Liquid Argon group (LAr) investigating how to optimise the calorimeters to improve the trigger for low energy events which is needed for Heavy ion collisions.
Stephen’s PhD project focuses on ATLAS run 3 searches for dark matter which decays from the Higgs Boson. The Higgs boson will be produced with a Z boson and with careful selections, events where the Higgs boson decay is invisible can be selected, allowing for the feasibility of different dark matter models to be investigated. The project also includes upgrade work on the ATLAS inner tracker (ITk) to prepare for the High luminosity upgrade of the LHC (HL-LHC).