Professor James Stirling
Head of the Cavendish
Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy
Professorial Fellow of Peterhouse
CBE, FRS
Group: High Energy Physics
Address:
Room 211 Bragg Building,
Cavendish Laboratory,
JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge CB3 0HE.
Tel: +44 (0)1223 337083
Email: wjs2 "at" cam.ac.uk
Personal Assistant:
Mrs Leona Hope-Coles
Tel: +44 (0)1223 337429
Fax: +44 (0)1223 760520
Email: lh294@cam.ac.uk
Biography:
James Stirling is the Head of the Cavendish Laboratory. He took the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge (as a student at Peterhouse), graduating with first class honours in 1975 and obtaining his PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics in 1979. After periods of research in the USA, Cambridge and the European Centre for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, he was appointed to a lectureship at Durham in 1986. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1989, to Reader in 1990 and to Professor in Mathematical Sciences and Physics in 1992. In 2000 he became the first Director of the new Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP) at Durham University. From 2001 to 2003, he served as the first Chair of the PPARC Science Committee, the research council's top-level scientific advisory committee. In 2005 he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University, a post which he held for three years before moving to Cambridge to take up the Jacksonian Professorship in September 2008. In recognition of his contribution to particle physics research he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in May 1999. He was awarded a CBE in the 2006 New Years Honours list, for services to science. He has been a member of the Physics Panel in two Research Assessment Exercises (2001 and 2008) and was Deputy Chair of the 2008 panel. He served on the Council of the Royal Society from 2007 to 2008, and is currently a member of the Council of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Research Interests:
My research area is theoretical particle physics, particularly 'phenomenology', i.e. the interface between theory and experiment, with special emphasis on the physics of high-energy particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I am a member of the MSTW (Martin-Stirling-Watts-Thorne) collaboration producing state-of-the-art parton distribution functions (pdfs) for use at high-energy particle colliders such as the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC.
Research Group - High Energy Physics
Selected Publications:
QCD and Collider Physics, R.K. Ellis, B.R. Webber, W.J. Stirling; Cambridge University Press (1996).
Parton distributions: a new global analysis, A.D. Martin, R.G. Roberts, W.J. Stirling, R.S. Thorne; European Physics Journal C4:463-496 (1998).
Physics interplay of the LHC and the ILC, G. Weiglein et al.; Physics Reports, 426:47-358 (2006).
Parton distributions for the LHC, A.D. Martin, W.J. Stirling, R.S. Thorne, G. Watt; European Physics Journal C63:189-285 (2009).