Brian Foster (physicist)

Brian Foster (born 4 January 1954 in Roddymoor, Crook, Co. Durham) is a British experimental particle physicist. He is Donald H. Perkins Professor of Experimental Physics Emeritus at the department of physics, University of Oxford, and Alexander von Humboldt Professor a. D. at the University of Hamburg. He was leading scientist at DESY where his research topics include new methods of acceleration, deep inelastic scattering using the ZEUS particle detector, and the International Linear Collider. He began his career on the 4,2m bubble chamber at CERN and then became a postdoctoral researcher at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Imperial College London, where he worked on the TASSO experiment at DESY. He was an author of the paper in which the discovery of the gluon was announced. He spent 20 years at Bristol University as successively Lecturer, Reader and then Professor of Experimental physics and head of the particle physics group. He was a member of the BaBar collaboration that discovered CP-violation in the B-quark system. He then became head of particle physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Balliol College Oxford. In the last 20 years, Foster has worked predominantly in accelerator physics, particularly plasma acceleration.