Dr Daniel Hynds

I received an MSci in Chemical Physics in 2010 from the University of Glasgow. As part of my degree I spent a year at CERN as a technical student, working on amorphous carbon films to mitigate electron cloud build-up in accelerating structures. I continued to study a PhD at the University of Glasgow on semiconductor detectors for particle physics; specifically on the upgrade of the LHCb Vertex Locator (VELO).

From 2014-2018 I was a CERN fellow, working on detector technologies and reconstruction algorithms for the proposed Compact Linear Collider (CLIC). This was followed by a postdoctoral researcher position at the Dutch National Institute for High Energy Physics (Nikhef) where I led the module production for the LHCb VELO. In 2020 I was appointed to a staff scientist position at the University of Oxford, within the OPMD laboratory.

My research interests revolve around particle detection with semiconductor detectors, specifically the design of novel detector concepts and the construction of large detector systems. At present I am responsible for part of the UK ATLAS Upgrade project, where the UK will deliver one of the two pixel detector end-caps to be installed on the ATLAS experiment at CERN during Long Shutdown 3. A third of the detector modules will be assembled in the OPMD lab at Oxford, along with the half-rings which will be mounted in the final detector.

As part of my research activities I run a series of UK-based online lectures in instrumentation (https://indico.global/e/ukinst2026) and a bi-annual summer school which will be hosted in LMH in August 2026 (https://indico.global/e/ukhepinst2026).

At LMH I teach the third year B6 course on Condensed Matter Physics and the 1st year CP4 course on Multiple Integrals and Vector Calculus. I also take students for MPhys projects.