Brian Cox life and biography

Brian Cox is a British particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. He is working on the R&D project of the FP420 experiment in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 metres from the interaction points of the main experiments.

He is best known to the public as the presenter of a number of science programmes for the BBC. He also had some fame in the 1990s as the keyboard player for the pop band D:Ream.

Cox was born and raised in Chadderton, Lancashire, the son of bank workers. His mother was a teller in a bank, and his father was a junior branch manager and his working-class grandparents worked in cotton mills in Oldham, Lancashire. Cox was a bright but not outstanding pupil. He attended Hulme Grammar School in Oldham from 1979 to 1986 (where he received a D grade for A-Level Mathematics), and studied physics at the University of Manchester where in 1993, while still a student, he joined D:Ream, who had several hits in the UK charts, including the number one, "Things Can Only Get Better", later used as a New Labour election anthem. He already had previous experience of the music industry in the 1980s as a keyboard player with the Rock band Dare.

During his music career he earned an undergraduate first-class honours degree and a MPhil degree, both in physics, from the University of Manchester. A year after D:Ream disbanded in 1997, Cox was awarded his PhD in high energy particle physics at the same university, based on his thesis drawn from work he did for the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany.

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