JAI student wins prestigious poster prize

Oxford JAI student Laurence Wroe has won the early-career poster competition at the annual IET Particle Accelerator Engineering Network (PAEN) meeting.

PAEN 2020, held on the 9th - 10th September, was originally due to take place at CERN, but the ongoing pandemic meant the annual event was moved online. Topical talks on the COVID-19 response from the particle accelerator community took place on Day 1 before a series of talks on cutting edge accelerator research on Day 2.

Day 2 also included the PAEN 2020 Early-Career Poster Competition where entrants would be judged on poster quality, engineer's ability to answer questions, quality of the engineer's contribution to the work and relevance to particle accelerator engineering.

A member of the JAI for just one year, Laurence was encouraged by his supervisors, Rob Apsimon (Lancaster University and Daresbury Laboratory), Suzie Sheehy (University of Oxford and Melbourne University) and Manjit Dosanjh (University of Oxford and CERN) to enter the poster competition with his research. The poster, entitled Utilising Transverse Forces in Accelerating RF Cavities with an Azimuthally Modulated Design, can be viewed here.

Having spent a large proportion of the first year of his DPhil completing the JAI's graduate training course as well as working with my cohort to design a 3 TeV Muon Collider for acceleration in the SPS tunnel, this was the first event to publicise and get feedback on his research.

Presenting the poster virtually behind my laptop was a new experience but I really enjoyed it and the engineers who visited my 'Zoom Room' engaged with the poster well and asked great questions that have also given me food for thought on taking my research forwards. 

After 2 hours of presenting and discussing his poster, he closed the 'Zoom Room' and was delighted to be informed that he had won the poster prize and briefly joined the main video stream of the conference to accept the Prize.

I'm really pleased to have been awarded the 2020 PAEN Poster Prize, particularly in an early stage of my DPhil research, and I am hoping to write up the work presented into a paper in the coming months. Any questions, comments or thoughts on the research presented in the poster are most welcome so please email! 

Laurence can be reached via his Oxford email Address.