McPherson named ATLAS deputy spokesperson

Rob McPherson (physics and astronomy) has been named deputy spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment, a 3,000-strong international scientific collaboration that built and manages one of two particle detectors at the CERN Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border. The new position effectively makes McPherson the vice-president of ATLAS, working with the spokesperson to oversee detector and computing operations and manage relationships with funding agencies. The UVic ATLAS team designed and built several crucial components of the detector, which made scientific history by discovering the elusive Higgs boson particle in 2012.