Stephen Sekula
Stephen Sekula
Professor
Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy
Faculty of Arts and Science
Faculties & Schools
stephen.sekula@queensu.ca
705-692-7000 x2114
Homepage
Office: SNOLAB 229
ProfessorEveryone

Research Description

Stephen Sekula's Research Interests include: the nature of dark matter, neutrino astronomy, instrumentation research, development, construction, and operation software development for experimental science data analysis and simulation science communication

Selected Degrees

PhDUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

Biography

Stephen completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, searching for the rare decay of a particle called a “B meson” (made from a bottom quark and an up quark) into a tau lepton and its partner neutrino. He then served in post-doctoral positions at MIT and later Ohio State University. A common theme of his work throughout this period was enhancing sensitivity to rare phenomena, culminating in 2008 in the discovery of the long-sought ground state of bottomonium, the simplest bottom-quark system.

He accepted a faculty position at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 2009. At SMU, he joined the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider and contributed in 2012 to the study of the newly discovered Higgs boson’s fundamental quantum properties. He then contributed to the discovery of the Higgs particle’s direct interaction with bottom quarks in 2018. He trained and graduated five PhD students during this period. He served as SMU’s Director of Graduate Studies in Physics in 2019 and then as Physics Department Chair from 2020-2021. He is now also a Professor of Physics at Queen’s University.