Posted by Sudbury Northern Life
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Institute board of management chair Dr. William McLatchie announced Monday that Dr. Nigel Smith has been appointed as the new Director of the SNOLAB International Underground Science Facility, effective June 1.
The SNOLAB International Underground Science Facility is situated 2 kilometres underground in Vale-Inco's Creighton Mine near Sudbury.
Smith comes from STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in Oxfordshire, England where he is deputy divisional head (Precision Weak Physics) and group leader (Dark Matter). He is project manager for the Boulby Underground Facility and the ZEPLIN III Dark Matter experiment and a visiting professor at Imperial College, in London, England.
He brings extensive experience in underground science and broad scientific management abilities. He was appointed following a six-month search by an international selection committee. He will replace Dr. Tony Noble, who has served as SNOLAB director for three years.
Smith received his bachelor of science in physics from Leeds University in 1985 and his Ph. D. in astrophysics from Leeds in 1991. He has worked in astrophysics studies throughout his career.
His early research work was in studies of ultra high energy gamma rays from astrophysical sources using extensive air shower array telescopes in Harrogate, UK and at the South Pole. In 1987 he "wintered-over" as the sole operator of the telescope at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott station at the South Pole, being the first Briton to successfully winter at the Pole itself.
Since 1992 he has been actively involved in the development and operation of underground detectors to search for the Weakly Interacting Dark Matter particles left over from the Big Bang and thought to make up about 23 per cent of the universe. 
The new director expressed his excitement at the prospect of his new position.
"SNOLAB is a fantastic Canadian research laboratory that is attracting some of the best international astroparticle physics experiments in the world," he said.
"Its extreme depth and cleanliness provides an ultra-low background environment in which to perform these exquisite measurements. It's a great privilege, and wonderfully exciting, to be given the opportunity to serve as director of SNOLAB, and I really look forward to working with the great team there to continue to develop its strong and world-leading research program."
