Ex-PFS boy making Penang proud in global particle research

A FORMER Penang Free School student is having the rare honour of doing his research at CERN (French acronym for European Organisation for Nuclear Research) and at the same time his postdoc at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Dr Khoo Teng Jian, 32, is a particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. It’s a huge experimental collaboration involving 3,000 physicists around the globe. (ATLAS is the largest volume detector ever constructed for a particle collider. It is 46m long and 25m in diameter and sits in a cavern almost 100m below ground.)

Khoo’s work centres on the search for new elementary particles produced by the Large Hadron Collider which may lead to a deeper understanding of the basic laws governing the universe. As a particle physicist, he studies how particles that are even smaller than atoms exist and interact.

“I wasn’t that interested in physics as a student. I found the textbook to be quite boring. But I got inspired later after reading popular science literature books written for non-specialists. They contained ideas, weird and funny concepts but they somehow seemed to have logic,” Khoo said after giving about an hour-long talk to some 100 PFS students at the Penang Digital Library 2 today.

Khoo posing with Ho (in batik) and PFS students after delivering his talk at Penang Digital Library 2 today.

The talk, titled ‘From Gelugor to Geneva: A Penang Lang’s route to CERN’, was also attended by some students from the Universiti Sains Malaysia and Wawasan Open University, and members of the Astronomical Society of Penang (ASP).

It was organised by Tech Dome Penang, the Penang Digital Library and the office of the Chief Minister Incorporated. Also present were Tech Dome Penang chief executive officer Dr Khong Yoon Loong, CMI deputy general manager S. Bharathi, PFS senior assistant Ho Nean Chan and ASP president Dr Chong Hon Yew.

After finishing school, Khoo obtained a scholarship from the International School of Penang (Uplands). He then began his undergraduate degree at Williams College in Massachusetts, United States, after which he went to the University of Cambridge where he took up Experimental High-Energy Physics (or Particle Physics).

Moving on after his PhD, Khoo was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College in Cambridge. Since 2016, he has been based at the Department of Nuclear and Particle Physics of the University of Geneva.

He has twice received awards from the ATLAS collaboration, one for his PhD thesis on searches for supersymmetric particles and another for his pioneering work on measuring the properties of hadronic jets and invisible particles.

Ho (second from left) presenting a souvenir to Khoo. With them are Bharathi and Khong.

Asked what advice he would give to aspiring students, Khoo said: “I feel they should do something that interests them. And bear in mind that there’s a lot of things to learn beyond school.

“They can also look at open courses for undergraduates, from institutions like MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Cambridge or Harvard.”

Khong said the talk was organised to inspire the students and also to showcase Penangites (Penang Lang in Hokkien) doing world-class research.

“He (Khoo) talks about the fundamental properties of nature that determine the existence of the universe and life itself,” said Khong.

At the end of the talk, Khoo also took some questions from the PFS students, Khong and Chong.

“It’s a great and inspiring talk. I have been involved with astronomy for the past 33 years and at that time, many students were already keen on elementary particle physics research at the most fundamental level,” Chong said.

For Khoo, now that he is back in Penang for a short holiday to visit his grandmother, he would certainly indulge in his favourite food – nasi kandar.

 

Story by K.H. Ong
Pix by Chan Kok Kuan