​Sinead joined STFC in July 2024 as the Director of the Particle Physics Department, the UK’s national lab for particle physics. She is a member of the Large lab Directors Group (LDG), chair of STFC’s National Labs Research Board and a member of the European Study Group for the update of the European Strategy in Particle Physics.

Sinead was until then the Head of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics at the University of Edinburgh. A particle physicist specialising in particle physics at colliders, Sinead has co-led research in decays of the Higgs boson to tau leptons at the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider as well as matter-antimatter oscillations at the Collider Detector experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron collider (CDF) in the USA. Until recently, she led the fifteen institutions that make up the ATLAS-UK collaboration, as Principal investigator and spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration in the UK, and its representative at CERN’s Resources Review Board.​ 

Sinead has served on STFC’s Projects Peer Review Panel, Strategic Particle Physics Review, CERN Fellowships Panel, and a Technical Division Review, in addition to the Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics Committee, and is a UK member of the European Committee for Future Accelerators.  She was awarded the UK Physical Sciences Laureateship in the New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik prize in 2021 and she was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2022.

Sinead can be contacted via her executive assistant - Karen Woudberg​​​​