Sean S. Cooper

Sean S. Cooper May 27 - June 28: I will be participating in the QIST 2019 workshop at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. Please contact me if you wish to meet during this conference.

Current Studies Professional Experience Teaching Experience Programming Public Outreach Public Speaking Courses Attended Extracurricular Interests

July — Sept. 2017

Research Intern, Queen Mary University of London.
Continuing the work of my Master's thesis, I researched how aspects of cohomology could be used to study the structure of the higher dimensional manifolds that appear in Double Field Theory and Exceptional Field Theories. This investigation furthered my knowledge of string theory and differential topology, and was a great chance to experience being a research physicist.

July — Sept. 2016

ATLAS Summer Student, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron.
I attended DESY’s summer student programme where I worked as a researcher in the ATLAS group. I investigated the Boosted Decision Tree based classification used to distinguish top-associated Higgs production events from background. It was found that the analysis could be significantly improved with the introduction of b-tagging variables.

Whilst at DESY I focused on improving the multivariate analysis used in the classification of the ttH, with H → bb, single-lepton channel. I found that, in the highest significance bin, the background could be almost halved by including the jets’ b-tagging scores as discriminating variables. Before leaving DESY I gave a talk to members of the ATLAS group presenting these results. A written report of the project can be found here:
Cooper, Sean, “Using b-tagging to Improve ttH Searches at ATLAS”, 2016.

Aug. — Sept. 2015

Software Development Intern, Queen Mary University of London.
I wrote a piece of data visualisation software to be used in conjunction with mass spectrometry outputs. The project’s goal was to improve the tools available to proteomics researchers.

Whilst stationed in the school of physics, the work took on a somewhat interdisciplinary theme. In proteomics research, liquid chromatography mass spectrometry is used to study the proteins that make up a given sample. I joined a team of physicists who had developed a tool to analyse proteomics data, my task being to create an interactive visualisation software to display their results. A screenshot of the tool during the development stage can be seen in figure 1.

A plot of proteomics data. This is in fact a screenshot of the visualisation tool developed during my time as a software development intern.

Figure 1: An early prototype of the proteomics data visualisation tool. Datapoints have been “clustered” together to indicate that the analysis found them to originate from the same molecule or peptide.

I was given a large degree of freedom over the project’s direction, and so made sure to keep a close relationship with the analysis team. I regularly conferred with my colleagues about what features they wanted to see implemented, and as time progressed the researchers began utilising my software to investigate their analysis. Through communication I was able to learn from my colleagues and in turn provide them with a more useful service.

Towards the end of the project, the team brought me along to a meeting with their collaborator from bioinformatics to present the visualisation tool I had been working on.

June — Aug. 2015

Educational Video Editor, GRADnet.
An 8-week video-editing contract undertaken as part of the SEPnet summer placement scheme, whilst there I edited a series of physics lecture videos aimed at postgraduates.

Apr. — Sept. 2013

Science Technician, The King Edmund School.
I managed eight classrooms, preparing apparatus and reagents for use in experiments.