Stephen Adler's Curriculum Vitae Home Page

Welcome to my Curriculum Vitae web page. I'm currently looking for a job in the private sector where I can apply my scientific knowlege coupled with my IT/software development skills to a new field of endevor. I've created 2 versions of my resume since I expect propsective future employers will be interested in either my academic background or in my technology development background. Therefore I have one version of my CV in which I emphasize my academic work in the field of experimental high energy and nuclear physics, and another in which emphasizes my work in software development, electronics, computing, and information technology.

Links to my resumes

• Future employer cover letter.
• Cover letter in word document format.
• Resume with emphasis on my academic work.
• Click here for the Word Document form of the above CV.
• Resume with emphasis on my electronic, computing, software development, and information technology work.
• Click here for the Word Document form of the agove CV.
• My official list of publications.

What follows is a short summary of my career in physics and my work with computing. Above are links to my official resumes.

In short, I presented my Ph.D. thesis defense in November of 1995 when I was 33 years old at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. I did my thesis research with the Electronic Detector Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This group built a detector dedicated to search for the rare Kaon decay, K+ -> pi+ nu nubar, which is predicted to occur about 1 time every 10 billion decays. My technical work with the group involved writing software for the data acquisition system as well as head several hardware projects involved with the trigger and DAQ system. The software project on the DAQ system involved designing a multi-process data control system running on an SMP SGI Irix mainframe. The trigger project involved the design, fabrication and deployment of a specialized ASIC to speed up the trigger decision from several 100 micro seconds down to about 12 microseconds.

In the summer of 1999, I joined the PHENIX experiment which is part of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL. This detector is designed to record data at a high rate in order to look for the more rare signatures of a possible Quark Gluon Plasma state which has been theorized to occur when two nuclei collide and the protons and neutrons "melt" into a pure quark gluon plasma state. My technical work with this experiment has been to finish developing the timing system, which involves setting up the clock distribution, as well as part of the trigger and busy logic distribution for the detector. I also wrote the software which operates the data taking of the detector. It is a CORBA based network distributed application, written in C++ for the server back end, java for the GUI front end, and MySQL is used as the database engine to store data taking parameters. The software operates over 100 components attached via ethernet, using CORBA as the enderlying communication fabric. I wrote a web based interface to the database using php which allows one to query which data runs were taken under various operating conditions.

Stepping back in time, I graduated from Kenyon College in 1984, with a bachelor of arts degree in Physics. My senior adviser worked in the field of medical nuclear imaging and my senior year project with him was to develop software which automatically followed the outline of the heart's left ventricle from an ultra sound image.

After graduating I got a job with the positron emission tomography (PET) group in the Texas Medical School located in Houston Texas. This group was headed by Dr. Lance Gould who was then the chief of cardiology. The technical leader of the group was Nizar Mullani. At the time, they were actively designing and advancing the instrumentation technology of PET. My work with them involved writing software for both the data acquisition and image reconstruction of the new Positron camera they were building. Toward the end of my work with them, a private company called Positron was formed and I worked for them as a consultant, helping them deploy the software I wrote for the Positron camera.

In April of 1987, I married my wife who I met in Houston, and in August of that year, we left for Long Island where I resumed my graduate education. I was admitted into the physics department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY Stony Brook), under their Master's in Instrumentation program. I graduated from the program in August of 1989. My thesis work revolved building a small drift chamber used to monitor the quality of the gas for the larger central drift chamber used in the D0 experiment at Fermi National Laboratory, currently the site of the most powerful proton/anti-proton collider in the world.

After graduation, I got a job at Brookhaven National Laboratory, working as the software librarian for the D0 experiment. This job involved organizing the distribution of the software developed by over 100 physicists to over 20 universities and laboratories scattered about the world. There were also system administration jobs requiring the setup and maintenance of a VAX cluster used by the D0 physicists at BNL.

In the spring of 1991, I was admitted back into the graduate program in the Physics Department at SUNY Stony Brook, but this time into their Ph.D. program. This is where I joined up with the Electronic Detector Group and proceeded with my thesis research as described above.