ISSC 2010 Keynote Speaker Dr. Benjamin Todd

Dr. Benjamin Todd has worked for the past seven years as a machine interlocks engineer at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He received a B. Eng. first class honours degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Sunderland and a Ph. D. in accelerator controls from Brunel University.

Dr. Todd is responsible for the design, development and implementation of two mission-critical electronic machine protection systems of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a multi-billion dollar machine, being the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, having Gigajoules of stored energy, and is the world’s largest machine, with a circumference of 27 kilometres. The nature of CERN’s research, in building unique machines such as the LHC, involves exotic technologies engineered and exploited solely to solve the machine’s specific engineering challenges. This makes protection system design particularly challenging, as the design of functionally correct components is already very difficult.

Dr. Todd is currently researching dependable system design using programmable logic, and is working inside CERN to encourage the consideration of system safety in the organisation’s design and realisation of machine protection. He has published work in Particle Accelerator Conferences, the International System Safety Conference, and co-authored a paper in the New Journal of Physics.

Dr. Todd’s interlock systems are being retro-fitted to the whole of CERN’s accelerator complex, and his collaboration has been sought for the protection system design of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) at Cadarache, France.

Dr. Todd can be reached at his professional e-mail address, benjamin_todd@cern.ch