My main activity is presently as curator of the Rutherford Museum of McGill University and of the McPherson Collection of Scientific Equipment of the McGill Department of Physics
The Rutherford Museum contains a collection of the actual apparatus used by Ernest Rutherford when he was Professor of Experimental Physics at McGill, 1898-1907. This apparatus enabled Rutherford to investigate the newly-discovered phenomenon of radioactivity, to establish the nature of the α-rays emitted by radium and thorium, and to formulate the revolutionary theory of radioactive transformation for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1908. The Museum also includes some photographs, letters, documents, and other materials relating to Rutherford's work.
The McPherson Collection comprises a large number of physical instruments and apparatus dating mainly from the mid-19th century to about 1920. Anna McPherson, after whom the collection is named, was a member of the McGill Physics Faculty from 1940 until her death in 1979. Many of the apparatus were originally used for teaching and demonstration in the Department of Physics and covers various aspects of mechanics, electricity and magnetism, heat, light, and sound.
You can get more details on the Webpage of the museum here: http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/museum/home.html
My research interest is in the study of nuclear reaction mechanism using heavy-ion beams. During my stay at Saclay, France I made a systematic study of nucleus-nucleus interaction at intermediate energy through the study of heavy-ion elastic scattering. I was part of a collaboration that initiate the study of nuclear structure using quasi-elastic reactions induced by unstable nuclear beams. I also studied the excitation of nuclear giant resonance through inelastic scattering and transfer reactions induced by heavy-ion beams. Since I joined McGill my main research interest has been in the study of nucleus-nucleus collisions at relativistic energies. The primary goal of this research is the study of the equation of state of hot hadronic matter and the phase transition to the new phase of matter, the quark gluon plasma. I was a member of the E814 and E877 collaboration at the AGS (Alternating Gradient Synchrotron) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. As part of these collaborations we produced some of the first results obtained with ultra-relativistic very heavy beams, namely Au beam. As part of the E877 Collaboration, we made the first observation of collective directed flow in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The study of flow has now become one of the important topics of heavy-ion studies at Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). I was a member of the PHENIX collaboration one of the two main experiments at RHIC. My last activities were on the understanding of the evolution of some experimental observables as the beam energy is increased to the energy that are now available at the RHIC and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.