Alison is a professor of physics and is the head of the Nuclear Physics Research and Enterprise Group at the University of Brighton. She is an experimental gamma-ray spectroscopist and her research is based on experiments she leads at international laboratories including GSI/FAIR in Darmstadt, Germany, the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and the  Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH) in Bucharest, Romania.

Alison is interested in measuring simple properties of exotic nuclei.  Her current focus is on neutron-rich A~100 nuclei where there is a prediction that the shape will change from prolate (rugby-ball shaped) to oblate (smartie shaped) as more neutrons are added. Her research teams produce these nuclei at experimental facilities around the world and study their properties in the short time (fractions of a second) before they decay into a different element.

Alison studied for her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Manchester before undertaking post-doctoral research work at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and at the University of Liverpool. After a spell as a Higher Scientific Officer at STFC Daresbury Laboratory, she joined the University of Brighton as a lecturer in physics and energy studies. She is now a professor of physics at Brighton and a fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is a member of the nuclear physics board of the European Physical Society  and regularly sits on Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant and fellowship panels. She recently participated in STFC's 2018 evaluation of the nuclear physics programme. 

She has supervised 12 doctorate (PhD) students to completion and is currently supervising a further two PhD students. She has examined over 20 PhD degrees at universities in the UK and in Australia, Finland, Norway, Spain and Sweden.

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students in gamma-ray spectroscopy and experimental nuclear structure physics.