Allison Macdonald

Allison MacDonald received the B.Sc. degree in physics from McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada, in 2012. She is currently pursuing the M.Sc. degree in Prof. John Davis's optomechanics group at the University of Alberta, AB, Canada. As part of her undergraduate degree, she has accumulated research experience in nuclear physics, theoretical statistical physics, high energy physics and quantum photonics. She worked with Prof. Rajat Bhaduri and Prof. Wytse van Dijk to identify phase transitions in finite systems of identical particles for her honours thesis. She also spent three coop work terms (twelve months) in Prof. Jennewein's group at IQC, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, where she was involved in both the development of the satellite QKD system and in testing a waveguide entangled-photon pair source. Finally, she spent four months in 2011 working with Prof. Dugan O'Neil's group at Simon Fraser University participating in the Summer Student Programme at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). At CERN, she analyzed the performance of multivariate techniques for discriminating tau leptons from quarks and electrons in the ATLAS detector.