Sean Coursey

139 Marcella St. #2 | Boston, MA | 02119

(707) 972-0378 | coursey.s@northeastern.edu



Math and Physics Undergraduate Student
Northeastern University


Particle Physics Research Assistant

The CMS Experiment, CERN


Neuroimaging Research Assistant
Athinoula A. Martinos Center, MGH


Profile

As a fifth-year undergraduate honors student at Northeastern University, I am pursuing a combined bachelors in Math and Physics with a minor in Behavioral Neuroscience.

From July through December 2024, I will be in France working as a research assistant under Professor Louise Skinnari at CERN's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. My work will focus on updating the data collection trigger system, which rapidly integrates the information of myriad sensors into a decision of whether or not a collision possibly includes interesting high-energy interactions and should be saved for later analysis. This filtering system is critical because storing all the petabytes of information the CMS produces would be untenable, but storing all the data of interest is crucial. I look forward to learning electrical engineering skills relevant to experimental physics, and to having the opportunity to apply the physics portion of my education.

For the past two years, I have been working at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital as a research assistant in Jingyuan Chen's CANDY Lab. The Martinos Center is one of the world’s premier research centers devoted to development and application of advanced biomedical imaging technologies, affiliated with both Harvard Medical School and MIT.

My Martinos Center work focuses on improving statistical analysis methods for fluorodeoxyglucose functional positron emission tomography (fPET-FDG), though I have also helped implement techniques for generating in-silico fPET-FDG data and assisted with collecting multimodal in-vivo data.

Since joining CANDY Lab in 2022, I have been the primary author of four conference abstracts on two research topics and am working on a research paper. It is currently receiving feedback from co-authors and will be in peer review by the end of the year. Neuroimaging statistics has been a fantastic application of my studies in mathematics and neuroscience.

Apart from school and work, I enjoy practicing and teaching ballroom dance, meditation, and ceramics. These hobbies provide a welcome balance to my academic work, allowing me to explore different forms of creative expression and maintain a healthy mind.