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Heather attended the University of Cape Town in South Africa from 1999 to 2005, where she obtained a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree in Physics. She then attended the California Institute of Technology, earning her Ph.D. in Physics in 2011. She worked as a CERN Research Fellow and a Research Staff Scientist from 2011 to 2017 before becoming a Divisional Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2017. Heather joined the UC Berkeley faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2019. She received the IUPAP C11 Young Scientist Prize in 2018 and is currently serving in a high-level management role as the Data Preparation Coordinator for the ATLAS experiment. Heather's research primarily revolves around experimental particle physics, focusing on the Higgs boson and its interactions, particularly with top, bottom, and charm quarks. She is involved in the development of track reconstruction algorithms and silicon detector algorithms, with a theme of applying machine learning to her research. Heather collaborates with Professors Marjorie Shapiro and Haicheln Wang, and the ATLAS group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory works across a broad range of physics topics including measurements of the Standard Model and searches for new physics.
University of California, Berkeley • Berkeley, CA
Focus on experimental particle physics and involvement in the ATLAS experiment.
CERN • Geneva, Switzerland
Worked on various projects related to particle physics.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory • Berkeley, CA
Involved in high-level research on particle physics.
The Mathematics Subject GRE is required for the Fall 2026 admissions cycle. General GRE is optional.