Sustainable accelerators

Denise Völker learned the love of nature collecting herbs and mushrooms deep in the Thuringian Forest with her grandparents. Shortly before the end of the East German regime, her teacher gave her a certificate with the following message: “In some countries, even a sharp tongue is considered unlawful possession of a weapon.” At DESY, the political scientist, who has a PhD, has been successfully using this tongue since 2019 to bring about a sustainable transformation.

Dominique started as a graduate mechanical engineer at STFC in 2020 and works in the STFC Technology Department.

During this time she has worked on the ATLAS upgrade project which involved design work but mainly undertaking testing to facilitate the development of a robotic stave insertion mechanism, to be shipped to CERN later this year. 

In 2022 Dominique started work on the ASPIRE project, in which we are designing, building and testing a green ammonia demonstrator plant on site at RAL.

Alongside this SHE has been working on the REACT project. REACT is researching a method for decarbonising heating on site at RAL through recycling the waste heat generated by ISIS and combining this with input from ground source heat pumps. This was a three month feasibility study which was complete in 2023. Funding from ISIS 2 has allowed Dominique to continue work on this project.

Dr Michael Warner is curator and owner of the Space Vault Exhibition, part of one of the UK's largest private collections of artifacts from the history of human space exploration.  Michael’s day job is Director of a consultancy firm working on policy in the offshore wind sector.   The Collection, and the current Space Vault Exhibition, is what Michael’s wife calls his ‘worryingly extensive hobby’.     The Collection includes artifacts brought back to Earth from the lunar surface, deep space and low-Earth orbit, covering the Apollo, Space Shuttle and Soviet era space programs, the International Space Station and SpaceX.

Oliver is a Vacuum Engineer working at ASTeC, Daresbury Lab. He is currently working on PIP-II and the LHC High Luminosity project. He is a founding member of SPADE when it started as a graduate project.

A graduate mechanical design engineer for ISIS Design Division who joined SPADE in Phase 2 in April '23, mostly involved in improving and developing the DfM pages of the site.

Jim is the Director of ASTeC. He has actively worked on numerous types of particle accelerator including synchrotrons, storage rings, linacs, energy recovery linacs, and fixed field alternating gradient accelerators. The prime focus of his career has been light sources of various types but he has also made contributions to particle physics colliders, neutrino factories, and industrial accelerators. He also has considerable breadth of expertise in key accelerator systems such as magnets, undulators, diagnostics, electron and positron sources, FELs, and beam dynamics. He has given more than forty invited talks and lectures at conferences, workshops, and schools on a wide variety of topics and has written two text books.​​​​

Sarah manages the sea level, sea level budget closure, sea state and sea surface temperature and ocean colour projects within the ESA Climate Change Initiative. Formerly she worked at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change PCC as the Head of Science Team for the Working Group I Technical Support Unit. Before that, I was Science-Policy Fellow at the European Geosciences Union and, before that, a PhD student researching methane emissions estimation at a high spatial resolution in the UK.

For the majority of my career I’ve worked in the civil service and local government. In Scotland, I led the Sustainable Development Commission developed work programme, worked on sustainability and social rented housing. Within Oxford City Council I delivered, the first city based Citizen Assembly on Climate Change.

I am a Fellow of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA)

I lead the Environmental Sustainability team within STFC, my responsibilities include the long-term strategic planning and implementation programme, projects, policies and initiatives to improve STFC’s sustainability agenda and meet our ambitious commitments for carbon reduction. STFC is aiming to be a leader in environmental sustainability agenda for our sector.

Stephen is a Chartered mechanical engineer who has spent his career doing engineering on and technical project management for spallation neutron sources, primarily the ISIS pulsed neutron and muon source at UKRI-STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Lab. He currently is group leader for the target design group, within ISIS’ Design division and is also the project manager for ISIS-II.

Matti Laitinen has 30 years’ experience in product and technology development for industries. Today he manages research in Motion, one of four ABB Business Areas.