Sam Whitehead

Background

About Sam Whitehead

I am a physicist from New Zealand now working as a geophysicist in seismic processing and imaging. I've worked on projects in various areas (shallow water North Sea environments to deep sea offshore West Africa and US GoM), and gained experience in diverse technologies (signal processing, velocity model building, conventional and PGS hyperTomo tomograpy, FWI, Beam, Kirchhoff and RTM migrations, post-processing techniques etc). Prior to starting work in geophysics (Oct 2011) I completed my DPhil degree at Oxford in Particle Physics working on aspects of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. In my first year, aside from courses, I worked on research and development for the next phase of LHC running. In particular I put together a system of hardware and software to perform Laser Speckle Interferometry. My second year of study was spent working at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. While at CERN the focus was my analysis topic: a measurement of the W boson charge asymmetry in ATLAS. This analysis reveals crucial information about the structure of the proton, important for discovery physics at the LHC; if we don't fully understand the way the proton behaves at the energy scale we are probing, then we can't hope to discover new physics. Specialties: large scale data analysis, software development, geophysical data processing, signal processing, imaging, project management, team development