Dr. Suzie Sheehy is an accelerator physicist and science communicator, an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Oxford. Suzie studied physics at the University of Melbourne in her native Australia (BSc Hons 2006) and PhD at the University of Oxford (DPhil, 2010), where her work focused on novel particle accelerators for particle therapy. She has spent much of her career working at the University of Oxford and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK), covering topics from high intensity hadron accelerators to novel medical accelerators.
She has held prestigious research fellowships from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (Brunel Fellowship 2010-2013) and the Royal Society (University Research Fellowship, 2017-2022). In 2019, Suzie was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Medical Accelerator Physics at the University of Melbourne, where she has created the only academic accelerator physics group in Australia. She collaborates globally, including the UK, Switzerland, USA, Japan, Nigeria, Botswana and Indonesia.
Suzie is also an award-winning public speaker, presenter and science communicator, dedicated to sharing science beyond the academic community. She has delivered professional lectures and keynote presentations, presented at major UK festivals, presented a YouTube series on accelerators and is an expert TV presenter for Impossible Engineering on Discovery Channel. Her TED talk ‘The Case for Curiosity Driven Research’ has over 1.9 million views, and her popular science book 'The Matter of Everything: the Twelve Experiments That Made the Modern World' has been published worldwide and selected for Times and Waterstones 'Best books of 2022' lists.
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