- published: 10 Feb 2015
- views: 464764
Brian Edward Cox, OBE (born 3 March 1968), is an English particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a professor at the University of Manchester.. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. He is working on the R&D project of the FP420 experiment in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 metres from the interaction points of the main experiments.
He is best known to the public as the presenter of a number of science programmes for the BBC. He also had some fame in the 1990s as the keyboard player for the pop band D:Ream.
Cox was born in Chadderton, Lancashire. His mother was a bank teller and his father a junior branch manager; his grandparents worked in cotton mills in Oldham. He attended the fee-charging Hulme Grammar School in Oldham from 1979 to 1986. It is regularly said that he failed his Mathematics A-level with a D grade, however this is a low pass grade. He cites a lack of interest and fledgling band commitments as the reason for the anomalous result. He studied physics at the Victoria University of Manchester where he joined D:Ream, a group which had several hits in the UK charts, including the number one, "Things Can Only Get Better", later used as a New Labour election anthem. He already had experience of the music industry in the 1980s as a keyboard player with the rock band Dare.