SNOLAB Welcomes Gilles Gerbier

Gilles Gerbier is a world-renowned expert in astroparticle physics. Dr. Gerbier has joined Queen’s University as the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Particle Astrophysics which involves working both in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy and at SNOLAB in Sudbury, researching the mysteries surrounding dark matter.

Dr. Nigel Smith, SNOLAB Director, welcomed Dr. Gerbier to his new position, “SNOLAB  welcomes Dr. Gilles Gerbier to Canada and the Queen’s University physics group. Dr. Gerbier brings a wealth of experience and expertise in dark matter research and underground science to Canada, and we look forward to working with him as he continues his research in these areas. Welcome, Gilles!”

The goals of Dr. Gerbier’s research include strengthening the Canadian presence in a joint North-American/European SNOLAB project to search for low-mass dark matter particles and facilitating the sharing and transfer of expertise and knowledge between European and Canadian researchers.

“I’m very excited to work at SNOLAB,” says Dr. Gerbier. “It is a unique site — one of the world’s premier underground research laboratories — and it is operated as a clean room. The technicians, engineers and scientists working there are highly skilled, and the resources, availability and equipment are second-to-none. Once I found out that the CERC funding was in place for the chair at Queen’s, moving to Canada was a straightforward decision to make.”

Dr. Gerbier is a graduate of the École Centrale Paris, and in 1983, he obtained his PhD from the Université Paris XI for work on neutrino interactions in bubble chambers. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he became a founding member and team leader of the Beijing-Paris-Rome-Saclay Collaboration, producing seminal work on the characterization of scintillators for dark matter searches.

SNOLAB is operated by the SNOLAB Institute whose member institutions are Carleton University, Laurentian University, Queen’s University, University of Alberta and Université de Montréal. It is located two kilometres below the surface in the Vale Creighton Mine near Sudbury, ON. Operational funding for SNOLAB is provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Province of Ontario.

For more information please contact:

Samantha Kuula
Communcations Officer, SNOLAB
(705) 692-7000 x2222
Samantha.Kuula@snolab.ca