Suzie Sheehy

Sheehy was born in Mildura in 1984.^[2][3] She moved to Melbourne as a child, and was inspired to study physics at a young age by her teachers at Parkdale Primary and Mentone Girls' Grammar School.^[2] She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne in 2006.^[4] In 2010, she earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where she worked in the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science.^[4] Her DPhil was part of the PAMELA project, focussed on designing non-scaling fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators for charged particle therapy^[5] supervised by Kenneth Peach.^[1]

In 2010 Sheehy was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 fellowship in high intensity hadron accelerators.^[4] She was part of the collaboration that achieved the first compact electron accelerator EMMA in 2011.^[6] She was appointed to a joint position in Intense Hadron Accelerators with the University of Oxford and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in 2015, and is now a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.^[4]

Sheehy is a science communicator and public speaker. Working with Emmanuel Tsesmelis, during her DPhil Sheehy designed a particle physics outreach show Accelerate! for 11- to 18-year-old children in the United Kingdom which later also ran in Germany.^[6] She was responsible for training presenters and delivering shows and workshops.^[6] The training was delivered as part the CERN teacher educational program.^[6] As part of the program, they made a YouTube video explaining How to Make a Cloud Chamber. It has received over 100,000 views.^[7] Sheehy worked with the Royal Institution to create videos about particle accelerators.^[8][9] She gave the 2012 National Space Academy keynote talk.^[10] She appeared on Discovery Channel's Impossible Engineering.^[11] She was a speaker at 2018 TEDx Sydney.^[12]

In 2022 she published her first book of popular science: The Matter of Everything: Twelve Experiments that Changed Our World (Bloomsbury).^[13]

• 2017 awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF).^[4][14]
• 2016 Institute of Physics HEPP Group Science in Society Award^[15]
• 2010 University of Oxford Vice Chancellors Civic Award^[16]
• 2010 British Science Association Lord Kelvin Award^[6]