Professor Colin Wilkin
I was an undergraduate in Sir Rudolf Peierls's Mathematical Physics Department in Birmingham from 1957 to 1960 and stayed on there to do a PhD with Stanley Mandelstam. The subject of my dissertation was "Cuts in the Complex Angular Momentum Plane" which showed, from the summation of a certain class of Feynman diagrams, the presence of Regge cuts as well as poles in scattering amplitudes. During my period as a fellow in the CERN Theory Division 1963-65, we realised that some of the diagrams that I had calculated in the thesis were relevant to the famous shadow effect in the scattering from the deuteron. This turned my attention to the analysis of scattering of elementary particles from nuclei at intermediate energy, a field which was blossoming with the Palevsky experiments at Brookhaven where I was a Research Associate 1965-67. These also showed me the benefits to a theoretical physicist of working with experimental nuclear/particle groups and most of my research work has since been inspired by such collaborations and I have participated in many experimental committees. When I came to UCL as a Lecturer in 1967, jobs were easy to get and I had no intention of staying there until retirement (apart from leaves of absence). The cut-backs in Higher Education in the Seventies and the excitement of working in Physics and Astronomy at UCL persuaded me otherwise and I was promoted to Reader in 1973 and to Professor in 1987. Though I enjoy lecturing, I acquired more administrative roles over the years; running the Departmental Teaching Committee for four years, chairing the Examination Boards for ten, and being the Ultimate Dean of the Faculty of Science of London University are just three examples. My principal current research interest is the analysis of meson production in nucleon-nucleon and nucleon-nucleus scattering in the near-threshold region, mainly in collaboration with Göran Fäldt (Uppsala). One of the main tools used is a revised final state interaction formalism based upon a new theorem that we discovered in quantum mechanics linking quite generally the normalisations of bound and scattering wave functions.

Professor Colin Wilkin

I was an undergraduate in Sir Rudolf Peierls's Mathematical Physics Department in Birmingham from 1957 to 1960 and stayed on there to do a PhD with Stanley Mandelstam. The subject of my dissertation was "Cuts in the Complex Angular Momentum Plane" which showed, from the summation of a certain class of Feynman diagrams, the presence of Regge cuts as well as poles in scattering amplitudes.

During my period as a fellow in the CERN Theory Division 1963-65, we realised that some of the diagrams that I had calculated in the thesis were relevant to the famous shadow effect in the scattering from the deuteron. This turned my attention to the analysis of scattering of elementary particles from nuclei at intermediate energy, a field which was blossoming with the Palevsky experiments at Brookhaven where I was a Research Associate 1965-67. These also showed me the benefits to a theoretical physicist of working with experimental nuclear/particle groups and most of my research work has since been inspired by such collaborations and I have participated in many experimental committees.

When I came to UCL as a Lecturer in 1967, jobs were easy to get and I had no intention of staying there until retirement (apart from leaves of absence). The cut-backs in Higher Education in the Seventies and the excitement of working in Physics and Astronomy at UCL persuaded me otherwise and I was promoted to Reader in 1973 and to Professor in 1987.

Though I enjoy lecturing, I acquired more administrative roles over the years; running the Departmental Teaching Committee for four years, chairing the Examination Boards for ten, and being the Ultimate Dean of the Faculty of Science of London University are just three examples.

My principal current research interest is the analysis of meson production in nucleon-nucleon and nucleon-nucleus scattering in the near-threshold region, mainly in collaboration with Göran Fäldt (Uppsala). One of the main tools used is a revised final state interaction formalism based upon a new theorem that we discovered in quantum mechanics linking quite generally the normalisations of bound and scattering wave functions.