BT Young Scientist 2014
Doctor, What’s the Matter? Congratulations to past student Kevin Maguire (Leaving Cert. class of 2010) who has been awarded a doctoral scholarship by the University of Manchester to do a PhD in particle physics. Kevin will be spending at least a year at CERN (the European Nuclear Research Laboratory) in Geneva where he will be using data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Ethan Hamman from 5EG proudly represented Newpark at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition in January. He submitted a project in the Social and Behavioural Science category, a comprehensive statistical analysis of people’s assumptions when identifying whether a person looks male or female, against the sex and age of those who completed the surveys. It was titled ‘Does gender or age influence perception of other people’s gender?’ Numerous students helped with the study by doing the surveys, and along with those completed on the internet, Ethan analysed over six hundred people’s responses, and subsequently analysed tens of thousands of data. Science teacher Claire Grant supported him through the process, and was amongst the may Newpark visitors to the exhibition. Ethan put an enormous amount of work into the project, and really enjoyed the four days in the RDS. We are all very proud of what he achieved. Kim Achari
Kevin will be using data from the LHCb detector on the LHC accelerator at CERN to investigate CP violation in particles that contain a charm quark. Many people have won Nobel prizes over the years for finding CP violation in different particles. CP violation is thought to be the reason why there is lots of matter and not much anti-matter in the universe; it’s a fundamental asymmetry in the physics of the universe. Kevin says his interest in physics started in Fifth Year at Newpark thanks to the influence of his physics teacher Mr Costello. We wish Kevin every success with his doctoral research. Kevin Maguire was Deputy Head Boy 2009-10
Newpark Mathletes
Team Maths 2014, a maths table quiz for Leaving Cert higher level students, took place on Friday, 31st January.
Newpark fielded a very strong team, including John Cummins, Simon O’Neill, Andrew Ramsay, Carla Redmond-Fernandez, Beatrice Ritzen, Matthew Sharpe, Niall Sherlock and Vladislav Sirenko. The Newpark team travelled to St. Michael’s College in Ballsbridge to compete against fifty other teams from the greater Dublin area. Taking place the Friday evening before the mocks, the table quiz gave students the opportunity for a fun night out, while at the same time preparing for their exams. Newpark students got off to a blistering start, in joint second place after the first four rounds, only one point behind the leaders! Unfortunately, Team Newpark was unable to keep up this pace, and the leaders pulled ahead in the second half of the competition. Still, Newpark finished very respectably, and an enjoyable night was had by all. Well done to all the Newpark team! Ellen Lawless, Newpark Maths
7