Dr Watson works on LHCb at CERN and has interests in detector development for future experiments. He was based at CERN from 1990-1998, and has worked for CERN, CRPP/Carleton Univ. (Ottawa, Canada), Rutherford Appleton Lab. and Birmingham University, where he became a member of academic staff in 2005.
Nigel Watson obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in 1991, on event reconstruction and measurements of electroweak effects in e+e- the OPAL detector at LEP. Continuing on this experiment, his physics activities included WW physics, soft QCD and event generators, and his technical contributions included online monitoring and alignment/calibration of the Z tracking chambers; online/offline database system for the experiment; reconstruction software for the endcap muon chambers; and software distribution framework.
In 2001, he began development of high precision calorimetry for a future e+e- collider (CALICE Collaboration, ~300 physicists), is joint analysis coordinator (since 2007) and has carried out simulation studies, data analysis and testbeams for a CMOS MAPS based digital ECAL (DECAL).
He coordinated R&D for the ILC Beam Delivery System collimators, was PI for the SLAC T480 R&D project (RF wakefields), and for ILC collimator damage tests at KEK. Following on from his career interests in precise measurements, carried out at LEP and prepared for by ILC-R&D, in 2011 Nigel brought a small team at Birmingham into the LHCb experiment at CERN, to extract new physics with rare decays at LHC, as well as working on the core simulation framework.