James Beacham

As a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the teams that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), James Beacham searches for evidence of new particles — dark matter, gravitons, dark photons, and exotic Higgs bosons among them — that could provide answers to the fundamental open questions of physics. Beacham completed his Ph.D. degree at New York University in 2014 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the ATLAS experiment group of The Ohio State University, based full-time in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to his research, he is a frequent speaker at popular science, technology, and futurism conferences and art/science events around the world, and has spoken about artificial intelligence at the BBC and dark matter at Gizmodo. His talk, “How we explore unanswered questions in physics”, was featured on TED.com and has been viewed over 1.4 million times. He has made numerous appearances on podcasts and radio shows, including NPR's "Science Friday"; has participated in documentaries on the BBC, Discovery, and the Smithsonian Channel, as well as independent productions; and talked particle physics with outlets like The New York Times, Wired, and Gizmodo. Beacham trained as a filmmaker before becoming a physicist and is interested in the connections between high-energy particle physics and exploratory art, film, and music. In 2015, Beacham launched Ex/Noise/CERN, a project colliding particle physics with experimental music and film to celebrate the LHC’s switch on to 13 trillion electron volts.

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