Christine Nattrass
Assistant professor in Relativistic Heavy Ion physics at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville
christine.nattrass@utk.edu



Publications
Thesis
Talks Posters
Cirriculum vitae
Rivet in Heavy Ion Collisions
Christine's Recipes
Resources on jet reconstruction
US LHC blog (my contributions)
Pictures of me doing physics
2012 Southeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics

Advice and my policies on:
Letters of recommendation
Etiquette tips for emailing your professors

Teaching

Phys 137 Fall 2022

Phys 138 Spring 2022

Phys 137 Fall 2023

Phys 138 Spring 2024

Research

Please see our group web page


About Me

I am an assistant professor at the University of Tennesee at Knoxville working on the ALICE experiment at CERN.  I am also on the PHENIX experiment at RHIC.  My current focus in ALICE is EMCal support and work studying transverse energy in the EMCal.  I have worked on testing and commissioning front end electronics for the EMCal and have co-lead the ALICE analysis working group on transverse energy.  In PHENIX I have helped with assembling the read out electronics for the VTX.  I also work extensively with the graduate students and organize the UT/ORNL journal club.

I recently chaired the organizing committee for the 2012 Southeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Jan. 12-15.  This conference featured a tour of ORNL; panels on women in physics, undergraduate research, graduate school, careers in physics, and minorities in physics; student presentations; astronomy demonstrations; and technical talks on physics.  We had over 100 students from across the Southeast attend.  This made planning, logistics, and budgeting much more difficult, but is a good problem to have.

Right now I'm in the initial phases of two new outreach projects.  I hope to work with an established author on a children's book on high energy physics.  I am also starting the initial phases of a project with Agnes Mocsy from the Pratt Institute where students from the Pratt Institute would make videos to explain relativistic heavy ion physics to the public.

I am a graduate from the relativistic heavy ion physics group at Yale University.  My thesis work was on high pT triggered correlations.  I studied collisions at both 62 GeV and 200 GeV in the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.  I studied correlations with identified strange particles (lambda and anti-lambda, K0s, and xi and anti-xi) identified in the STAR TPC by the reconstruction of their decay verticies in Cu+Cu collisions at 200 GeV.  I also compared the results for unidentified hadrons at 62 GeV and 200 GeV.  I was a teaching assistant every Spring and Fall semester in gradute school, including physics lab for premeds, physics for non-majors, graduate math methods, and differential equations.  I was a tutor for the Colorado State University College of Natural Sciences tutorial hall for four years.  I have attended several seminars and lectures on teaching and tutoring and I am a certified tutor.

For more details of my research, teaching, and service work please see my resume and my talks or email me.

In addition to being a heavy ion physicist, I am also an avid cook and I brew my own beer, wine, and mead.  I used to bike all of the time, since I did not have a car.  I have four bikes.  It is impossible to live in Knoxville without a car, so I now have a little blue Hyundai Accent - named the Poison Dart Frog.  This is a me-sized car.  I also run and weight lift.  Physics has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on non-science related activities, but when I get time I still play cello, sing, and play guitar.  I am a former rugby player and archer.



Somewhat obsolete links
Research Web page (STAR only)
Information on how to get to New Haven from various Airports