Ben is a postdoctoral research assistant in the laser-plasma accelerator group at Oxford, which is led by Professor Simon Hooker. In this group, he is working on the Plasma-Modulated Plasma-Accelerator (P-MoPA) project, which aims to develop a kHz repetition rate laser-wakefield electron accelerator.
Before coming to Oxford, Ben was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where he ran one of the BELLA Center's 100TW multi-beam laser systems. Prior to this, he worked at Oxford Instruments Andor in Belfast.
Ben received his doctorate from Queen's University Belfast in 2022, during which he studied laser-driven ion acceleration. He also received his undergraduate degree in physics from Queen's in 2018, for which he was awarded the John Geddes Physics Prize and the Greer Prize.