Nigel Watson obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in 1991, on event reconstruction and measurements of electroweak effects in e+e- the OPAL detector at LEP. Continuing on this experiment, his physics activities included WW physics, soft QCD and event generators, and his technical contributions included online monitoring and alignment/calibration of the Z tracking chambers; online/offline database system for the experiment; reconstruction software for the endcap muon chambers; and software distribution framework.
In 2001, he began development of high precision calorimetry for a future e+e- collider (CALICE Collaboration, ~300 physicists), was joint analysis coordinator (2007-2012) and has carried out simulation studies, data analysis and testbeams for a CMOS MAPS based digital ECAL (DECAL). In 2013, he joined the CLIC Detector and Physics Study Group. He continues the DECAL development in the context of the EPICAL-2 R&D project (links to ALICE FoCAL).
He coordinated R&D for the ILC Beam Delivery System collimators, was PI for the SLAC T480 R&D project (RF wakefields), and for ILC collimator damage tests at KEK.
Following on from his career interests in precise measurements, carried out at LEP and prepared for by ILC-R&D, in 2011 Nigel brought a team at Birmingham into the LHCb experiment at CERN, to extract new physics with rare decays at LHC, as well as working on the core simulation framework. More recently, he has joined the CODEX-b project, searching for long-lived particles using the LHCb interaction point.