Pinfold graduated in physics in 1972 with a B.Sc. from
Imperial College London and in 1977 with a Ph.D. from the
University of London. His Ph.D. thesis was on
weak neutral currents, stemming from his work as part of the
Gargamelle discovery team. From 1977 to 1989 he held research assistant and senior research assistant positions at
CERN (near
Geneva) and
Fermilab (near
Chicago). From 1989 to 1992 he was an associate professor at the
Weizmann Institute of Science. At the
University of Alberta, he was from 1992 to 1996 an associate professor and from 1996 to 2016 a full professor, and he is since 2016 a distinguished university professor. From 1995 to 2004 he was the University of Alberta's Centre for Subatomic Research[1] (renamed in 2006 the Centre for Particle Physics).[2] Since 2005 he has held a visiting professorship at
King's College London.[1] He frequently travels back and forth between the University of Alberta and CERN in Geneva.[3] He is the author or co-author of over 1250 citable publications and has given over 220 invited talks.[1]
Pinfold was from 1988 to 1989 the spokesperson for
CERN's WA88 experiment. From 1987 to 1992 he was the spokesperson for the MODAL experiment at CERN's
Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP).[1] He was one of the founders in the 1990s of the
ATLAS experiment involved in the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovery of the
Higgs boson.[4] From 2000 to 2002 he was the deputy spokesperson for ATLAS-Canada. Since 2000 he is the leader and spokesperson for the
MoEDAL experiment.[1][3] From 2004 to 2010 he was the deputy co-spokesperson for the SLIM experiment.[1][5]
In 2007, he won an award from ASTech (Alberta Science & Technology Leadership Foundation) for his leadership in starting the Alberta Large-area Time-coincidence Array, or ALTA, Project. This educational and research project "involves spreading out many cosmic-ray detectors over vast areas, connecting them through the Internet, and synchronising their readings with an integrated GPS system. Most of the detectors are run by high school students".[6] In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).[7] In 2018 he received the
Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize.[4]
Cojocaru, C.; et al. (2004). "Hadronic calibration of the ATLAS liquid argon end-cap calorimeter in the pseudorapidity region in beam tests". Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. 531 (3): 481–514.
arXiv:physics/0407009.
doi:
10.1016/j.nima.2004.05.133.
S2CID17438653.