Welcome!

My name is Kevin Paul, and I invite you to learn a little bit about me. Sci-phile.com is a summary of my life, skills, and accomplishments--an internet curriculum vita. I have played many roles in my young life, including physicist, programmer, computer technician, web designer, and teacher. Hopefully, I can convince you in these few pages that I am as versatile as I am enthusiastic.

I have a Ph.D. in particle physics theory, and for the past three years, I have been employed as an accelerator physicist. Accelerator physics is a specialized field dedicated to the design and construction of particle accelerators. Such devices exist all over the world, from the world's most powerful particle accelerator--the Tevatron, located at Fermilab west of Chicago--to numerous electron therapy machines for cancer treatment at a hospital near you. Particle accelerators are used by particle physicists as microscopes trained on the most fundamental building blocks of matter. Doctors use particle accelerators to target and destroy tumors that other cancer treatments cannot.

As a physicist, I try to model phenomena with mathematics and use that model to predict their behavior precisely. Sometimes the mathematical models are simple enough to solved by hand, but most of the time our world is too complex for one simple equation to describe. In those cases, I solve the mathematical equations with computers. Fortunately many of the problems that I try to solve have not been solved before, which makes my job constantly challenging and engaging. Many times, there is no software that I can simply purchase to find the solution. Instead, I have to write my own programs, or modify pre-existing programs, to solve the specific problem that I am interested in. This means I have to be fluent in a number of different computer languages, including C/C++, Fortran, Perl, and a variety of unix shell scripting languages. It also means I have to understand the types of computer algorithms necessary for solving such mathematical problems, and I have to understand their limitations and complications. Sometimes, new algorithms need to be developed to model the phenomena we study, and I need to be able to do that when needed as well.

Since computers are my tool of choice, I need to know how they operate and how to maintain them. Many times, the computer environment that I need for my simulations is unique to my needs, and that means I need to be the one who maintains the computer, its software resources and hardware. I need to stay up-to-date on computer hardware and technology so that I can adapt to new advances that may make trivial a problem that has been too difficult to solve in the past. I wouldn't be able to do what I do as a physicist if I didn't love computers and computational technology for their own merits.

My interest in computers has taken me beyond computational physics. In fact, some of my duties as a member of my research team have been to design and maintain collaboration websites. One recent site that I developed was for an accelerator physics workshop that I helped organize. Maintaining a site for the workshop's organization was important and it was something for which my skills were well suited.

Physics has also given me the opportunity to teach, which I truly love. I taught my way through graduate school at the University of Illinois, mostly teaching Pre-Med students about electricity, magnetism, and modern physics. As a testiment to how much I loved teaching, I received nine awards for teaching based on student evaluations (over nine consecutive semesters) and one award for teaching based on faculty nomination.