Dr. Giordon Stark is a Deaf project scientist, experimental particle physicist involved with the ATLAS collaboration at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, at UC Santa Cruz. He earned his PhD in Physics from University of Chicago in 2018, and a B.S in Physics from Caltech in 2012. Giordon's research focuses on looking for signs of physics Beyond the Standard Model with a particular interest in Electroweak Supersymmetry and hadronic final states. He is also passionate about boosted object reconstruction, jet substructure, pile-up mitigation techniques, designing robust hardware triggers, the intersection of particle physics & machine learning, and more! Through these efforts, Giordon has also made core contributions to improving the communication of physics results between the ATLAS Collaboration and particle physics theorists and phenomenologists. He is also leading a group of physicists within the experiment to combine and summarize the results of many BSM searches, providing key insights for the future of the successful ATLAS SUSY search program. When Giordon is not busy trying to prove the existence of SUSY, he can be found in the kitchen proving sourdoughs, baking pavlovas, and anything else he can get his hands on.
See my curriculum vitae for more detailed information.
Advisor: David W. Miller
Advisors: Kenneth Libbrecht and Harvey Newman
UC Santa Cruz Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellow Award
Springer Thesis Award
Nathan Sugarman Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Resarch
US ATLAS Outstanding Graduate Student Award
Young Researchers' Symposium Award for Best Poster Presentation
Department of Energy, Office of Science Graduate Student Research
UChicago Excellence in Graduate Teaching nominee
US LHC Users Association Lightning Round Winner
UChicago Excellence in Graduate Teaching nominee
UChicago Excellence in Graduate Teaching nominee
Caltech Excellent TA Award
Edward C. and Alice Stone Fellow
Throughout October 2022, UCSC celebrates postdocs’ contributions to and enrichment of our campus with Postdoctoberfest! In the Physical & Biological Sciences Division, we’re highlighting the work of Dr. Yu and Dr. Stark.
Does your internal monologue play out on a television, in an attic, as a bickering Italian couple – or is it entirely, blissfully silent?
Though still underrepresented in STEM, deaf and hard-of-hearing scientists are excelling in their fields and developing ways to more seamlessly communicate with their colleagues.
PSD members found creative ways to impact climate in the Division and further values of equity, diversity, and inclusion
The ATLAS collaboration has begun to publish likelihood functions, information that will allow researchers to better understand and use their experiment’s data in future analyses.
Particle physicist Giordon Stark describes his life as a Deaf physicist working for the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
SCIPPer Giordon Stark was an Instructor at the recent IRIS-HEP analysis preservation hands-on bootcamp.
The ATLAS Collaboration has released the first open likelihoods from an LHC experiment.
Deaf scientist Giordon Stark works to ensure the field of physics research is accessible to all.
CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Using highly sophisticated instruments, the organization's physicists and engineers study the fundamental particles that are the building blocks of the universe. How does CERN solve the challenge of finding a tool that can handle thousands of projects and contributors as well as a revolving door of contributors from across the world?
Giordon Stark explains how the LHC experiments at CERN work in ASL (American Sign Language).
TV sets are going out of fashion. Actually, not quite. But that's what it seems like. You could feign a comparison between Online Shopping and Brick & Mortar stores.
It's reminiscent of a Facebook-style newsfeed that changes the way that I look at email.
If a person is born deaf, which language do they think in?
My personal opinion when it comes to both seminars and colloquiums is that good talks (slides) can be suitable for both kinds of audiences. I am happy to talk about any of the work that I do, however the sections below will give you some abstracts for presentations that I am already prepared to give on shorter notice. If you are considering inviting me for a talk, be aware that I will need/be requesting a team of ASL interpreters for any and all conversations. Your campus disability services office can likely do that. If not, or you are not in the US, there is also probably a way. As outreach is an important part of my work, it would be great if you could arrange a gathering (dinner at a restaurant, drinks) with the younger folx such as: high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. This gathering would also need to have ASL interpreters as well. For senior members and other Early Career members in your department, I'm happy to have one-on-one sit-downs during the day before my talk if you want to schedule that. Finally, I'm always down for a baking competition.
My Bio Dr. Giordon Stark is a Deaf project scientist, experimental particle physicist involved with the ATLAS collaboration at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, at UC Santa Cruz. He earned his PhD in Physics from University of Chicago in 2018, and a B.S in Physics from Caltech in 2012. Giordon's research focuses on looking for signs of physics Beyond the Standard Model with a particular interest in Electroweak Supersymmetry and hadronic final states. He is also passionate about boosted object reconstruction, jet substructure, pile-up mitigation techniques, designing robust hardware triggers, the intersection of particle physics & machine learning, and more! Through these efforts, Giordon has also made core contributions to improving the communication of physics results between the ATLAS Collaboration and particle physics theorists and phenomenologists. He also led a group of physicists within the experiment to combine and summarize the results of many BSM searches, providing key insights for the future of the successful ATLAS Beyond the Standard Model search program. These results will be made public later this year. When Giordon is not busy trying to prove the existence of new physics, he can be found in the kitchen proving sourdoughs, baking pavlovas, and anything else he can get his hands on.
Communicating results between experimentalists and theorists in
particle physics has been long and varied. From efficiency maps
to selection cut flows - the collaboration between the two
communities has continued to grow and evolve. Now, particularly
more than ever, a stronger effort has been led within the ATLAS
Collaboration taking advantage of the existing technologies used,
such as containerization and plain-text data formats, to make
analyses fully reproducible. One such data product from an
experimental analysis relies on the statistical model used to
derive the results published in papers, and these statistical
models are essential information for analysis preservation and
reuse. The ATLAS Collaboration is starting to publicly provide
likelihoods associated with statistical fits used in searches for
new physics. These likelihoods adhere to a specification first
defined by the HistFactory p.d.f template [CERN-OPEN-2012-016].
This talk is future-focused and will describe my efforts in
improving the communication of the field along different
avenues. For communicating results of experimental particle
physics, I will describe how these statistical models came
about, the technical developments to make this possible, and
illustrate how detailed information on the statistical modeling
can enhance the short- and long-term impact of experimental
results. For communicating physics with for Deaf and
Hard-of-Hearing members, I will show how I have worked with
American Sign Language interpreters and linguistic experts
developing words and concepts to ensure accurate, complete
communication. These developed signs can also benefit
non-signers by changing how particle physicists communicate and
collaborate in a large international experiment among
colleagues of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and languages. And
finally, for the Early Career members of the community, I will
describe where we will and can go next with the ATLAS detector.
Searches for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider have constrained many models of physics beyond the Standard Model. Many searches also provide resources that allow them to be reinterpreted in the context of other models. We describe a reinterpretation pipeline that examines previously untested models of new physics using supplementary information from ATLAS Supersymmetry (SUSY) searches in a way that provides accurate constraints even for models that differ meaningfully from the benchmark models of the original analysis. The public analysis information, such as public analysis routines and serialized probability models, is combined with common event generation and simulation toolkits MadGraph, Pythia8, and Delphes into workflows steered by TOML configuration files, and bundled into the mapyde python package. The use of mapyde is demonstrated by constraining previously untested SUSY models with compressed sleptons and electroweakinos using ATLAS results.
Searches for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider have constrained many models of physics beyond the Standard Model. It has become more possible to search for Supersymmetry (SUSY) through electroweak interactions, the production of electroweakinos and sleptons, noted for their low cross sections. In addition, due to the high dimensionality of the phenomenological models, it is difficult to cover the landscape of new physics predicted by SUSY. This talk will introduce two different ATLAS analyses targeting simplified models and the unique techniques developed to explore challanging phase-spaces. After an overview of these state-of-the-art results from ATLAS, I will show how we extend existing constraints on these simplified models through statistical combinations. The results of the combination will remain the strongest limits set on electroweak SUSY production for the better part of this decade. Finally, this talk will wrap up with a brief overview of a reinterpretation pipeline (mapyde) that can be used both as a pedagogical tool as well as a tool to explore new models outside of the experimental collaborations. Using this tool, I will motivate some potential directions for new physics searches.
Seminar CEA Paris-Saclay
Colloquium University of Arizona
Seminar University of Arizona
Seminar University of Notre Dame
Seminar Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Colloquium University of Victoria
Colloquium Wayne State University
Seminar Southern Methodist University
Seminar Stony Brook University
Seminar Lund University, Sweden
Seminar University of Washington, Bothell
Seminar University of Pennsylvania
Seminar The University of Cambridge, UK
Seminar The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Seminar ICPS 2021
Plenary SUSY2019
Seminar The University of Chicago
Seminar Columbia College Chicago
You'll find a lot of things about me and my work if you google my name. This website and my CV may be helpful, as well as my twitter, to give you a sense of my wording/register/patter/sense of humor, etc. I really love puns. Additionally, my thesis website is a great example of how I approach public speaking.
A short simple summary of my work: "Tons of small small small things go boom in large tube that takes pics of the smash quite fast. I write code to look at the pics and try to find new things to fill gaps in our map of the field." from Twitter.
I grew up oral. In one-on-one, I speech-read very well. People will not realize I'm Deaf as I have no noticeable deaf accent, however I am a very quiet speaker. Sometimes you need to let me know if I'm too quiet and need to speak up. For brief interactions, I may be fine alone if the other person isn't too quiet or does not have a strong accent. If it's longer, please interpret. A good rule of thumb is to proactively slide in behind the speaker and begin interpreting.
I will default to speaking for myself in hearing settings always. Voicing for me will only ever be in very informal situations that are not Physics-heavy. I'm usually bad about making (and following) a script for any presentation I do. If you don't feel comfortable voicing for me, even if I want you to, let me know as I will switch to voicing. I don't mind. If there is a D/HoH person around, I might accidentally sim-com, but I try to avoid this. Usually, if there's at least one D/HoH person, I will sign for them and expect you to voice for sign-language impaired people.
I learned ASL relatively late. In fact, I learned it after I started learning PJM. Because I travel internationally a lot for conferences, I will also have picked up many pieces of other sign languages. Regardless of how I sign, I tend to prefer receiving in ASL where possible. If you do not feel comfortable with the subject material/jargon, because this ain't your daddy's physics, signed-english (PSE-like) and more fingerspelling is fine as I'll figure it out from there. Additionally, whenever I sign, I'm a bit lazier and tend not to finish my thoughts on the assumption that whenever I drop a sign, it's implicit what fits in.
Context and shared vocabulary will often not be clear, because they're research discussions! I'm accustomed to academic ASL with mouthing of key vocabulary, and do appreciate seeing the English when interacting in situations where using the same vocabulary as the hearing speakers would be helpful. If you aren't familiar with the jargon, mouth the word and guess at the phonetic spelling, and we'll have a high chance of getting the right word. If I know the word, I'll quickly feed you a sign to replace that word if it comes up often, so you do not need to fingerspell over and over again. Do not assume that's the official sign. Drop it like it's hot afterwards.
During presentations with minimal audience interaction, visual aids, and a single speaker, I'm comfortable following the presentation slides as long as you indicate where the focus is on the slides. Switch back to interpreting when the speaker starts spontaneous expression again or diverges from the slides significantly. I might not always look at you the entire time, but I'm always paying attention. I have photographic memory.
I'm always tired. Don't take offense.
When meetings are informal, please introduce yourself to everyone, because I'll forget. The exception is with people I work with. They're used to seeing me with interpreters by now and usually introductions are not needed.
I often work with hearing people who have never met a Deaf professional before. Please let me know how you feel about educating hearing participants about sign language and interpreting. I know "empowering the Deaf person to explain this stuff themselves" is a thing, but I've also answered that question fifty thousand times before, and delegation is an empowered act (if you're comfortable with it).
I work in a large international collaboration with 3000+ folks. The people in my community have varying levels of fluency in English. Many people will have accents. If you cannot work with accents at all, reconsider taking the job. You also need to let me know so I can make sure you have a strident team. It's not going to be just Spanish or Italian, but also French, Moldovan, Afrikaans, etc...
Are you fluent in signed languages other than ASL? Let me know! I will always want more practice with those during informal situations.
Shared vocabulary/names will be stored in my vocabulary sheet. Request access if you don't have access. Please be sure to add all unfamiliar terms to the spreadsheet after each session.