About me
Hello! My name is Robin Newhouse. I'm a particle physicist by training and a software engineer by trade.
I've smashed particles at near light speed to see what pops out, and I've tinkered with the world's biggest cloud to make it run smoother. These days I'm busy teaching machines to use tools, talk to APIs, and actually get stuff done. Agentic AI is my playground.
I like problems that don't come with instructions. Big messy datasets, half-baked ideas, strange edge cases. My mix of physics, code, and communication helps me turn the weird into something useful and occasionally even elegant.
Education
BSc in Astronomy with a Computer Science minor at UBC. During my degree, I bounced between the Software Practices Lab, the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, and Canada's particle accelerator centre TRIUMF.
PhD in Experimental Particle Physics, hunting for heavy neutral leptons at the LHC at CERN. Dissertation: Using displaced tracks to search for sterile neutrinos in the ATLAS detector.
My work at ATLAS
At CERN, I worked on the ATLAS experiment, one of the largest and most complex scientific endeavors in the world. My research hunted for evidence of heavy neutral leptons—hypothetical particles that could explain the nature of dark matter.
Working at CERN was a dream of mine since my first science class in 7th grade. It was an honor to collaborate with brilliant scientists and engineers as we probed the highest-energy frontier of physics.
In 2025, I and my colleagues at the ATLAS collaboration were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for our detailed measurements of the Higgs boson and discoveries at the LHC.
My work at AWS
At Amazon Web Services, I worked on the RDS open source team. I hacked on MySQL and MariaDB servers and built automation that keeps hundreds of thousands of managed database instances humming in the cloud.
I'm proud to have helped AWS become the largest external contributor to MariaDB. I also loved the challenge of automating internal tools so thousands of databases run smoothly with minimal human intervention.
Agentic AI
I'm having a lot of fun building AI agents that actually do useful work. Not chatbots that give you recipes, but systems that call APIs, crunch data, and ship results.
I've built agents for real estate analytics, document wrangling, and data pipeline taming. The field mutates daily, and I enjoy chasing the latest twist. Every week there's some new trick to make machines more useful (and slightly less inclined to stage a coup).
Black Rock Observatory
I serve on the board and help organize Black Rock Observatory, a nonprofit that brings telescopes and cosmic wonder to art festivals and unexpected places. Since 2014, we've helped over 50,000 people experience the awe of seeing Saturn's rings or touching a meteorite for the first time.
There's something magical about watching someone's face light up when they see Jupiter through a telescope. We blend science, art, and storytelling to share the cosmic perspective.