CERN@school and GridPP: harnessing the power of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid for research in schools and beyond

CERN@school is a programme that brings CERN into the classroom. It offers school students access to research-grade detector technology, data analysis and storage facilities, and a nationwide collaboration of fellow students, teachers and academics so that they can pursue their own investigation-driven research and experience being a scientist before making important career choices. This fellowship will support Tom over three years as the programme evolves to incorporate the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), harnessing the 485,000 processing cores and 270 petabytes of storage used to discover the Higgs boson to bring cutting-edge research techniques to schools and others through the GridPP Collaboration's new user engagement programme. The fellowship will support:

* Managing the CERN@school experimental facilities: the Timepix hybrid silicon pixel detector, developed by the Medipix2 Collaboration, can visualise and measure ionising radiation via a ~2cm^2 silicon sensor divided into a 256 x 256 pixel grid. CERN@school features a number of experimental facilities based around the Timepix detector. These include the CERN@school detector network (currently reaching 42 schools, outreach groups and science centres via the Institute of Physics' Physics Teacher Network and SEPnet), the Langton Ultimate Cosmic ray Intensity Detector (LUCID) experiment, launched aboard Surrey Satellite Technology Limited's (SSTL's) TechDemoSat-1 in July 2014, and the Langton Star Centre's Timepix detectors in the Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC (MoEDAL) at CERN. Thanks to Tom's work to date, datasets from these facilities are accessible to members of the CERN@school Collaboration. The fellowship will support the continued management of these facilities;

* Facilitating usage of GridPP resources for schools research: the GridPP New User Engagement programme makes use of a number of STFC-backed technologies such as DIRAC (for grid processing and storage management) and the CERN Virtual Machine File System (CVMFS) software deployment mechanism. The fellowship will exploit these technologies to bring schools - particularly those in deprived areas - onto the grid so that the excitement of data-driven physics research is accessible to all. The CERN Virtual Machine (VM) service can be used to instantly deploy research software into schools and connect to the grid. Where school IT infrastructure requires it, the "GridPPi", a Raspberry Pi developed by Tom to run with CERN@school and GridPP software, may be used instead to engage harder-to-reach audiences with the data analysis techniques used by scientists at CERN.

* The CERN@school Research Symposia: the first CERN@school Research Symposium was held in September 2014 in conjunction with the 10th International Conference for Position Sensitive Detectors (PSD10) at the University of Surrey, Guildford. Over one hundred students and teachers from around the country attended the joint plenary and poster sessions to share progress on research projects. Workshops for detector usage and data analysis were also held. The fellowship will support these for the next three years.

* Training and development for the IOP Physics Teacher Network: the fellowship will support the development of a training and CPD programme for teachers, outreach officers, science centre staff, and Physics Network Coordinators (PNCs) in collaboration with the National Centre for Science and Engineering Research in Schools (NCSERS) and the Science Learning Centres. This includes lesson plans for using the detectors in class. This will allow students from all schools to benefit from the CERN@school programme.