John Wilson obtained his PhD from Imperial College in 1976 having measured the K- charge exchange with a polarised target, a novel measurement, the first using a “frozen spin target”. Before the end of his PhD, he joined the University of Birmingham as a research fellow in 1973. With Birmingham, he worked on a hypercharge exchange experiment and then on the measurement of dimuon production at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). This was the first result from the SPS and showed clearly the importance of quark-antiquark annihilation in J/Ψ production. John Wilson was resident at CERN for two years (1977, 19787) as contact person for this experiment.
In 1978, with the Birmingham group, he was a founding member of the UA1 collaboration which subsequently discovered the Intermediate vector Bosons (the W+- and Z0 ). These were very exciting times; our experiment spokesman, Carlo Rubbia shared the Nobel Prize for these discoveries.
From 1985 till 2002, he worked on the OPAL experiment at LEP with major responsibilities for the construction of the endcap muon chambers and for analysing the muon data.
In 2000-2002, He carried our an experiment on the TRIUMF accelerator in Vancouver, Canada, to measure muon scattering at low energy – an important test to gauge the feasibility of muon cooling for possible future neutrino factories.
From 2002 till the present day, Wilson has been working on the ATLAS experiment: firstly on developing radiation hard optical components with which to read out the signals from the experiment’s Semiconductor Tracker (SCT). Then a major activity has been the testing of the SCT readout electronics, commissioning the detector and monitoring its subsequent operation.