About me
Hello! My name is Robin Newhouse. I am a particle physicist by training and a software engineer by trade.
For many years I smashed particles together at record speeds and looked at the weird stuff that comes out. Now I help make the largest cloud infrastructure in the world just a little bit better.
I thrive in organizations where I can apply my expertise in extracting insights from big data. My background in software engineering, AI systems, and technical communication enables me to tackle today's most challenging problems.
Education
I received a BSc in Astronomy with a minor in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. Throughout my degree, I worked as an undergraduate researcher at the UBC Software Practices Lab, The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Institute, and Canada's particle accelerator centre TRIUMF.
I graduated in 2022 with a PhD in Physics. My focus was High Energy Particle Physics, in particular, searching for evidence of heavy neutral leptons at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. You can read my dissertation here: Using displaced tracks to search for sterile neutrinos in the ATLAS detector.
My work at AWS
At Amazon Web Services, I am a software engineer on the RDS open source team. I work on the MySQL and MariaDB servers and the automation software that maintains hundreds of thousands of managed database instances in the cloud.
I'm proud to have helped AWS become the largest external contributor to MariaDB. I also love tackling the challenge of automating internal tools to keep thousands of databases running smoothly with minimal intervention.
My work at ATLAS
During my time at CERN, I worked on the ATLAS experiment, one of the largest and most complex scientific endeavors in the world. My research focused on searching for evidence of heavy neutral leptons, which are hypothesized particles that could explain the nature of dark matter.
Working at CERN has been 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.
I am always interested in opportunities for science outreach and communication. For several years I have been part of a mobile astronomical observatory project, the Black Rock Observatory.