Chris Parkes of the University of Manchester in the UK has been appointed as the new spokesperson of the LHCb experiment collaboration. Parkes, who was previously the deputy spokesperson of the collaboration, will represent more than 1400 people from 85 institutions in 19 countries for a period of three years, beginning 1 July 2020.
Parkes takes over the LHCb leadership from Giovanni Passaleva of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Florence, Italy, who has served as LHCb spokesperson from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2020.
“It’s an exciting time to take the reins of LHCb,” say Parkes. “We are preparing many exciting physics results from analyses of the full data taken during the first decade of LHC operations. We’re currently constructing and installing our new detector apparatus, the LHCb Upgrade I. It will allow us to collect larger data sets and relies on a new paradigm of real-time analysis, free of the restrictions that come with a traditional hardware trigger. The construction activities have been heavily disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but we are working together across the international collaboration to complete the experiment. For the further future, we are planning an Upgrade II of the detector that will allow the full exploitation of the High-Luminosity LHC. LHCb is a growing global community that celebrates our diversity and spirit of open collaboration. It will be a pleasure and honour to lead the collaboration in the next stage of its journey.”
“It has been a great pleasure serving the collaboration these last three years,” says Passaleva. “During this term Chris and I have led a major renewal and improvement of the experiment for the upcoming LHC run, Run 3. And we had the fortune to witness historical discoveries! It was really great to work with Chris and I have no doubt he will lead LHCb to new heights.”
Parkes is a professor at the University of Manchester, UK. He has been deputy spokesperson of LHCb for the past three years and has been a member of the collaboration for more than twenty years. Parkes was one of the instigators of both the LHCb Upgrade I and II, and led the UK’s construction activities for the LHCb Upgrade I. He has worked extensively on physics studies involving the charm quark and on the LHCb Vertex Locator (VELO) detector, serving as the detector’s Project Leader during the first LHC physics period (2010–2012). Prior to LHCb, he worked on W-boson physics with the DELPHI experiment at the previous CERN collider, LEP.