After obtaining a first class honours degree in physics at Imperial College in 1991, Tara Shears pursued a PhD in particle physics at Cambridge. Following a PPARC posdoctoral Fellowship with the University of Manchester and then a CERN Fellowship, she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship with the University of Liverpool in 1999. There, Tara works on the CDF and LHCb experiments. Her research on CDF concerns heavy quark production in modes that can be used to test QCD, the theory of the strong force, as well as providing a probe for New Physics production. On LHCb (an experiment based at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN), Tara leads a group whose mission is to test the current understanding of particle physics, by paying particular attention to the behaviour of the weak force. First results were released a month ago, investigations continue.
Before this Tara worked on OPAL, an experiment at LEP, where she made measurements of heavy quark lifetimes and W production. Tara has also worked on the ATLAS experiment, where her work focussed on providing real-time algorithms to sift through the vast amount of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider, and only retain the most interesting part.
