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Staff


Staff linked to BILPA activities consists mainly of members of the particle physics groups, with colleagues from Nuclear (†) and Medical Physics (*). Below you find a list of all people involved in BILPA activities, and the profiles of the people who are key to the development and management of the lab.




Academics and Research Staff

‒ Phil Allport, Laura Gonella, Stuart Green*, Paul Newman, Kostas Nikolopoulos, Peter Jones†, David Parker†*, Juergen Thomas, Nigel Watson


Post-doctoral Staff

‒ Ioannis Kopsalis, Ben Phoenix*, Tony Price, Alasdair Winter


Technical Staff

‒ James Glover, Amelia Hunter, Simon Pyatt


PhD Students

‒ John Cotterill, Robert Bosley, Sam Flynn, Patrick Freeman, William George, Marc Granado, Stephen Maple, Jonathan Mulvey, Patrick Knights, Håkan Wennlöf




As with all facilities they need experienced and trained staff to run them.

Meet the staff who are the key members of the Particle Physics Silicon Laboratory.



Phil Allport

Phil Allport

Phil Allport is the professor at the University of Birmingham leading the School's new instrumentation initiative, BILPA.

Phil is an expert on radiation-hard detectors for use at hadron colliders and pioneered the use of p-type substrate sensors for such environments, as a founder member of CERN’s RD50 Collaboration. From 2011-2015 he was the Upgrade Coordinator of the ATLAS Experiment on the LHC and a member of the ATLAS Executive Board. He is now the ITk Institute Board chair.

He is a leading international player in the High-Luminosity LHC (LHC upgrade) programme and is the Silicon Detectors expert within the European Committee for Future Accelerators Detector R&D Panel. He has served on a number of national and international committees including chairing the UK Particle Physics Advisory Panel and the IoP High Energy Particle Physics Group.

He is a founder member of the Proton Radiotherapy Verification and Dosimetry Application (PRaVDA) consortium, employing HL-LHC detector technology developed with UK industry for medical applications.

He has been the Birmingham lead within AIDA-2020, where the MC40 cyclotron provides the UK’s only Transnational Access facility within this EU funded programme and is used extensively for a range of radiation studies.

Over the years, Phil has presented on particle physics instrumentation at most of the major particle physics conferences and to the main international committees. He has also been involved in organising a large number of international conferences and workshops on particle physics detectors.



Laura Gonella

Laura Gonella

Laura in an expert on semiconductor detectors for High Energy Physics experiments, having worked on novel sensor concepts, radiation-hard CMOS technologies, hybridisation techniques, and powering schemes. She has a leading involvement in a wide range of instrumentation projects, including R&D and production.

She is currently working on the upgrade of the ATLAS strip tracker at the HL-LHC, where she co-leads the UK module production. She is also heavily involved in the development of an experimental facility at the US-based Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), where together with colleagues at the Lawrence Berkley national Lab she has been leading the R&D activities for the development of a silicon vertex and tracking detector for a number of years. She has recently been appointed Tracking Working Group co-convener for the EIC ATHENA detector collaboration.

Since she arrived in Birmingham in 2015, she established a vibrant R&D programme on silicon detectors towards future colliders working on the development of radiation-hard Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) in commercial CMOS imagining technologies at 180 and 65 nm nodes and Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGAD) for fast timing applications, and general development of silicon sensors in the context of the RD50 collaboration.

She manages the irradiation programme at the MC40 high intensity irradiation line of the University of Birmingham. Laura regularly serves as expert on experiment review and grant evaluation panels.



Simon Pyatt

Simon Pyatt

Simon Pyatt is the senior research technician for the BILPA facility and the Birmingham Particle Physics Group.

He joined the University of Birmingham in 2000 and was originally employed as a PCB layout designer. When Ian McGill left for a job at CERN in 2001 Simon took over the running of the facility.

Simon has worked on the original ATLAS SemiConductor Tracker project as the senior technician. He has been involved in other work that include projects for other schools, Universities and even external companies.

He has extensive knowledge of wire bonding and ASIC bonding techniques for both prototyping and production work. He also has experience of mechanical, electrical and electronic engineering.

Simon also maintains the BILPA website.

Here is the link to Simon's work page



Tony Price

Tony Price

Tony Price has a PhD in novel particle detection methods and a Masters degree in Physics with Particle Physics and Cosmology, both gained at the University of Birmingham.

He is currently employed as a Research Fellow developing radiation hard sensors for future Particle Physics experiments and medical applications. Depleted CMOS Active Pixel Sensors are currently under investigation for use in Digital Electromagnetic Calorimetry at the proposed International Linear Collider, and Future Circular Collider experiments.

Tony is also a member of the Proton Radiotherapy Verification and Dosimetry Applications (PRaVDA) Consortium which seeks to build the worlds first fully silicon proton Computed Tomography device to reduce uncertainties during proton radiotherapy and improve the treatment of certain paediatric, and head and neck cancers.



James Glover

James Glover

James Glover is a research technician involved in the ATLAS experiment upgrade. He joined the University of Birmingham in 2017 and moved to the Birmingham Particle Physics Group in 2019.

James received his BEng (Hons) in 2009 from De Montfort University, here he also earned a PhD in thermal properties and measurements of electronic devices. His PhD was part of an EPSRC funded project to research the integration of an on-wafer micro-coolers for III-V planar Gunn diodes.

Within the BILPA facility, James' main duties are assisting the production of the Inner Tracker (ITk) for the ATLAS experiment upgrade. This will include research and development of techniques and measurements to assist the production procedure and other projects around the BILPA facility.