Andy Parker

Professor Andy Parker was born in 1956 in Bristol. He is the son of an engineer, Maurice Parker, and he spent some of his early life in Turkey, where his father worked at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He was educated at the French Embassy school in Ankara, and then at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital in Bristol as a boarder. He read Physics at Pembroke College Oxford, graduating in 1978. He began his long association with the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a summer student, before starting a PhD in Particle Physics at University College London in 1978. He was a member of the CERN staff from 1982 to 1989, with a brief period of employment as a Stagiere Étranger at the Centre d’études nucléaires at Saclay, Paris. In 1989 he was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and was elected as a Fellow of Peterhouse. Since then, he has pursued his research in particle physics, rising to Professor of High Energy Physics in 2004 and to Head of the Cavendish in 2013, a post he still holds. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and an honorary Professor at the British-Kazakh University in Almaty.