Cameron Clarke is a Staff Scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) working in the Biomedical Research and Innovation Center (BRIC) as part of the Radiation Detector and Imaging Group, where he supports medical imaging detector and system development.
As a detector physicist with a background in experimental nuclear physics and industrial medical imaging research, he recently joined BRIC to study novel detector technologies, develop medical imaging systems, and build bridges from the research expertise at the lab towards biomedical applications and tech transfer. Before joining the lab staff, Cameron worked as an industry physicist at Canon Medical Research, USA in Illinois helping develop spectrally resolved X-ray detectors for next generation medical imaging scanners. He received his Ph.D in 2021 in Nuclear Physics from SUNY Stony Brook University working on Jefferson Lab Hall A experiments to precisely measure the neutron skin thicknesses of the Calcium-48 and Lead-208 nuclei. He was introduced to Nuclear Physics and the Jefferson Lab community through the Summer Undergraduate Research Internships (SULI) program in 2014, during which he worked on characterizing the CLAS12 Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors, before which he worked in Astronomy instrumentation research as an undergraduate at Mississippi State University.
Throughout his time as an early career scientist Cameron has sought to share his passion for physics and scientific research with others, focusing on widening access to resources for students’ success and shifting the culture to promote thriving careers within or outside of the traditional tenure-track academia path. Cameron has served as a peer-leader through science writing and student organization volunteering – while at Stony Brook Cameron helped form their Physics Graduate Student Association (PGSA) and led it for several years, as well as participated in the Stony Brook peer-led career skills development workshop series, the Ph.D Career Ladders Program (PCLP), which he is currently working to implement among the Jefferson Lab early career researcher community. While serving as the inaugural Vice President, then President, and later Treasurer of the PGSA, Cameron strove to foster a welcoming and strong community and help his fellow students address and resolve any issues they encountered at SBU or New York.
In his spare time, as a writer and journalist during his undergraduate studies, Cameron had more than forty of his opinion and news articles published in The Reflector, MSU’s student newspaper, where he also served as Editor of the Opinion section in the Fall of 2014. Focusing on the interface of science and culture, Cameron also published several works of nonfiction as well as poetry in The Streetcar, Mississippi State University’s creative arts journal, where he also served as nonfiction editor for the second and third volumes.
Cameron has been involved in various forms of scientific research ever since his sophomore year of college. If you are interested, here is a blog post giving a summary and motivation for his PhD parity violating electron scattering (PVES) experimental nuclear physics research.
Beyond The Standard 