“The most important insight I have gleaned about the process of researching into the fundamental nature of matter is best described by Einstein’s famous quote: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
James Pinfold, PhD (University College London), BSc (Honours, Imperial College of Science & Technology), FRSC, is an internationally renowned particle physicist who, in 1997, became the youngest ever leader of an international collider experiment. As a graduate student at University College London in 1972, Pinfold was a leader in CERN’s discovery of the neutral current, the first hard evidence for Electroweak Unification. In 1992, he became a founding member of the ATLAS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that in 2012 announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Alberta and leads the LHC’s newest experiment, MoEDAL, focusing his efforts on searching for new physics at the high-energy frontier and, on the cosmic frontier, searching for remnants from the birth of the universe.
Photo credit: Richard Siemans
