Sean C. Griffin

About Me

I currently work as an Instrumentation Specialist at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) in Madison. I am part of the team developing detectors for IceCube-Gen2. I specialize in instrumentation development and data acquisition systems, but I have been known to dabble in large-scale simulations and data analysis.

Prior to taking my positino at WIPAC, I was a contractor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the suburbs of Washington, DC. I’ve dabbled in a lot of projects, usually relating to gamma-ray telescopes but I’ve also worked a bit on fast (microsecond) optical transients and radion interferometry. I’ve also been known to dabble in simulations and data analysis.

Background

I grew up in Deux-Montagnes, Quebec , a suburb of Montreal, Canada, and did my undergrad and grad school at McGill University.

For grad school, I worked on the VERITAS experiment, an array of four Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory south of Tucson, Arizona. My Master’s project was my first introduction to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) where I developed a photon counter for use on VERITAS during periods of moderate to bright moonlight when (at the time) VERTIAS was not cabable of gamam-ray observations.

I remained at McGill for my doctorate and have worked on a variety of instrumentation and calibration tasks. For my PhD thesis, I developed what is known as the VERITAS Bright Moonlight Program. which Traditionally, VHE gamma-ray observations require dark skies as the night sky background can quickly dominate the system, producing (at UV wavelengths, the sky is 100 times brighter during a full moon).