The boundary between industry and academia can feel like a chasm. Opportunity abounds for those willing to bridge the gap.

Massimiliano Pindo began his career working on silicon pixel detectors at the DELPHI experiment at the Large Electron–Positron Collider. While at CERN, Pindo developed analytical and technical skills that would later become crucial in his career. But despite his passion for research, doubts clouded his hopes for the future.

“I wanted to stay in academia,” he recalls. “But at that time, it was getting really difficult to get a permanent job.” Pindo moved from his childhood home in Milan to Geneva, before eventually moving back in with his parents while applying for his next research grant. “The golden days of academia where people got a fixed position immediately after a postdoc or PhD were over.”

The path forward seemed increasingly unstable, defined by short-term grants, constant travel and an inability to plan long-term. There was always a constant stream of new grant applications, but permanent contracts were few and far between. With competition increasing, job stability seemed further and further out of reach. “You could make a decent living,” Pindo says, “but the real problem was you could not plan your life.”

Translatable skills

Faced with the unpredictability of academic work, Pindo transitioned into industry – a leap that eventually led him to his current role as marketing and sales director at Renishaw, France, a global engineering and scientific technology company. Pindo was confident that his technical expertise would provide a strong foundation for a job beyond academia, and indeed he found that “hard” skills such as analytical thinking, problem-solving and a deep understanding of technology, which he had honed at CERN alongside soft skills such as teamwork, languages and communication, translated well to his work in industry.

“When you’re a physicist, especially a particle physicist, you’re used to breaking down complex problems, selecting what is really meaningful amongst all the noise, and addressing these issues directly,” Pindo says. His experience in academia gave him the confidence that industry challenges would pale in comparison. “I was telling myself that in the academic world, you are dealing with things that, at least on paper, are more complex and difficult than what you find in industry.”

Initially, these technical skills helped Pindo become a device engineer for a hardware company, before making the switch to sales. The gradual transition from academia to something more hands-on allowed him to really understand the company’s product on a technical level, which made him a more desirable candidate when transitioning into marketing.

“When you are in B2B [business-to-business] mode and selling technical products, it’s always good to have somebody who has technical experience in the industry,” explains Pindo. “You have to have a technical understanding of what you’re selling, to better understand the problems customers are trying to solve.”

However, this experience also allowed him to recognise gaps in his knowledge. As he began gaining more responsibility in his new, more business-focused role, Pindo decided to go back to university and get an MBA. During the programme, he was able to familiarise himself with the worlds of human resources, business strategy and management – skills that aren’t typically the focus in a physics lab.

Pindo’s journey through industry hasn’t been a one-way ticket out of academia. Today, he still maintains a foothold in the academic world, teaching strategy as an affiliated professor at the Sorbonne. “In the end you never leave the places you love,” he says. “I got out through the door – now I’m getting back in through the window!”

Transitioning between industry and academia was not entirely seamless. Misconceptions loomed on both sides, and it took Pindo a while to find a balance between the two.

“There is a stereotype that scientists are people who can’t adapt to industrial environments – that they are too abstract, too theoretical,” Pindo explains. “People think scientists are always in the clouds, disconnected from reality. But that’s not true. The science we make is not the science of cartoons. Scientists can be people who plan and execute practical solutions.”

The misunderstanding, he says, goes both ways. “When I talk to alumni still in academia, many think that industry is a nightmare – boring, routine, uninteresting. But that’s also false,” Pindo says. “There’s this wall of suspicion. Academics look at industry and think, ‘What do they want? What’s the real goal? Are they just trying to make more money?’ There is no trust.”

Tight labour markets

For Pindo, this divide is frustrating and entirely unnecessary. Now with years of experience navigating both worlds, he envisions a more fluid connection between academia and industry – one that leverages the strengths of both. “Industry is currently facing tight labour markets for highly skilled talent, and academia doesn’t have access to the money and practical opportunities that industry can provide,” says Pindo. “Both sides need to work together.”

To bridge this gap, Pindo advocates a more open dialogue and a revolving door between the two fields – one that allows both academics and industry professionals to move fluidly back and forth, carrying their expertise across boundaries. Both sides have much to gain from shared knowledge and collaboration. One way to achieve this, he suggests, is through active participation in alumni networks and university events, which can nurture lasting relationships and mutual understanding. If more professionals embraced this mindset, it could help alleviate the very instability that once pushed him out of academia, creating a landscape where the boundaries between science and industry blur to the benefit of both.

“Everything depends on active listening. You always have to learn from the person in front of you, so give them the chance to speak. We have a better world to build, and that comes only from open dialogue and communication.”

The post A scientist in sales appeared first on CERN Courier.

In the past decade, machine learning has surged into every corner of industry, from travel and transport to healthcare and finance. For early-career researchers, who have spent their PhDs and postdocs coding, a job in machine learning may seem a natural next step.

“Scientists often study nature by attempting to model the world around us into math­ematical models and computer code,” says Antoni Shtipliyski, engineering manager at Skyscanner. “But that’s only one part of the story if the aim is to apply these models to large-scale research questions or business problems. A completely orthogonal set of challenges revolves around how people collaborate to build and operate these systems. That’s where the real work begins.”

Used to large-scale experiments and collaborative problem solving, particle physicists are uniquely well-equipped to step into machine-learning roles. Shtipliyski worked on upgrades for the level-1 trigger system of the CMS experiment at CERN, before leaving to lead the machine-learning operations team in one of the biggest travel companies in the world.

Effective mindset

“At CERN, building an experimental detector is just the first step,” says Shtipliyski. “To be useful, it needs to be operated effectively over a long period of time. That’s exactly the mindset needed in industry.”

During his time as a physicist, Shtipliyski gained multiple skills that continue to help him at work today, but there were also a number of other areas he developed to succeed in machine learning in industry. One critical gap in a physicists’ portfolio, he notes, is that many people interpret machine-learning careers as purely algorithmic development and model training.

“At Skyscanner, my team doesn’t build models directly,” he says. “We look after the platform used to push and serve machine-learning models to our users. We oversee the techno-social machine that delivers these models to travellers. That’s the part people underestimate, and where a lot of the challenges lie.”

An important factor for physicists transitioning out of academia is to understand the entire lifecycle of a machine-learning project. This includes not only developing an algorithm, but deploying it, monitoring its performance, adapting it to changing conditions and ensuring that it serves business or user needs.

Learning to write and communicate yourself is incredibly powerful

“In practice, you often find new ways that machine-learning models surprise you,” says Shtipliyski. “So having flexibility and confidence that the evolved system still works is key. In physics we’re used to big experiments like CMS being designed 20 years before being built. By the time it’s operational, it’s adapted so much from the original spec. It’s no different with machine-learning systems.”

This ability to live with ambiguity and work through evolving systems is one of the strongest foundations physicists can bring. But large complex systems cannot be built alone, so companies will be looking for examples of soft skills: teamwork, collaboration, communication and leadership.

“Most people don’t emphasise these skills, but I found them to be among the most useful,” Shtipliyski says. “Learning to write and communicate yourself is incredibly powerful. Being able to clearly express what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, especially in high-trust environments, makes everything else easier. It’s something I also look for when I do hiring.”

Industry may not offer the same depth of exploration as academia, but it does offer something equally valuable: breadth, variety and a dynamic environment. Work evolves fast, deadlines come more readily and teams are constantly changing.

“In academia, things tend to move more slowly. You’re encouraged to go deep into one specific niche,” says Shtipliyski. “In industry, you often move faster and are sometimes more shallow. But if you can combine the depth of thought from academia with the breadth of experience from industry, that’s a winning combination.”

Applied skills

For physicists eyeing a career in machine learning, the most they can do is to familiarise themselves with tools and practices for building and deploying models. Show that you can use the skills developed in academia and apply them to other environments. This tells recruiters that you have a willingness to learn, and is a simple but effective way of demonstrating commitment to a project from start to finish, beyond your assigned work.

“People coming from physics or mathematics might want to spend more time on implementation,” says Shtipliyski. “Even if you follow a guided walkthrough online, or complete classes on Coursera, going through the whole process of implementing things from scratch teaches you a lot. This puts you in a position to reason about the big picture and shows employers your willingness to stretch yourself, to make trade-offs and to evaluate your work critically.”

A common misconception is that practicing machine learning outside of academia is somehow less rigorous or less meaningful. But in many ways, it can be more demanding.

Scientific development is often driven by arguments of beauty and robustness. In industry, there’s less patience for that,” he says. “You have to apply it to a real-world domain – finance, travel, healthcare. That domain shapes everything: your constraints, your models, even your ethics.”

Shtipliyski emphasises that the technical side of machine learning is only one half of the equation. The other half is organisational: helping teams work together, navigate constraints and build systems that evolve over time. Physicists would benefit from exploring different business domains to understand how machine learning is used in different contexts. For example, GDPR constraints make privacy a critical issue in healthcare and tech. Learning how government funding is distributed throughout each project, as well as understanding how to build a trusting relationship between the funding agencies and the team, is equally important.

“A lot of my day-to-day work is just passing information, helping people build a shared mental model,” he says. “Trust is earned by being vulnerable yourself, which allows others to be vulnerable in turn. Once that happens, you can solve almost any problem.”

Taking the lead

Particle physicists are used to working in high-stakes, international teams, so this collaborative mindset is engrained in their training. But many may not have had the opportunity to lead, manage or take responsibility for an entire project from start to finish.

“In CMS, I did not have a lot of say due to the complexity and scale of the project, but I was able to make meaningful contributions in the validation and running of the detector,” says Shtipliyski. “But what I did not get much exposure to was the end-to-end experience, and that’s something employers really want to see.”

This does not mean you need to be a project manager to gain leadership experience. Early-career researchers have the chance to up-skill when mentoring a newcomer, help improve the team’s workflow in a proactive way, or network with other physicists and think outside the box.

You can be the dedicated expert in the room, even if you’re new. That feels really empowering

“Even if you just shadow an existing project, if you can talk confidently about what was done, why it was done and how it might be done differently – that’s huge.”

Many early-career researchers hesitate prior to leaving academia. They worry about making the “wrong” choice, or being labelled as a “finance person” or “tech person” as soon as they enter another industry. This is something Shtipliyski struggled to reckon with, but eventually realised that such labels do not define you.

“It was tough at CERN trying to anticipate what comes next,” he admits. “I thought that I could only have one first job. What if it’s the wrong one? But once a scientist, always a scientist. You carry your experiences with you.”

Shtipliyski quickly learnt that industry operates under a different set of rules: where everyone comes from a different background, and the levels of expertise differ depending on the person you will speak to next. Having faced intense imposter syndrome at CERN – having shared spaces with world-leading experts – industry offered Shtipliyski a more level playing field.

“In academia, there’s a kind of ladder: the longer you stay, the better you get. In industry, it’s not like that,” says Shtipliyski. “You can be the dedicated expert in the room, even if you’re new. That feels really empowering.”

Industry rewards adaptability as much as expertise. For physicists stepping beyond academia, the challenge is not abandoning their training, but expanding it – learning to navigate ambiguity, communicate clearly and understand the full lifecycle of real-world systems. Harnessing a scientist’s natural curiosity, and demonstrating flexibility, allows the transition to become less about leaving science behind, and more about discovering new ways to apply it.

“You are the collection of your past experiences,” says Shtipliyski. “You have the freedom to shape the future.”

The post Machine learning in industry appeared first on CERN Courier.

“Confucius famously may or may not have said: ‘When I hear, I forget. When I see, I remember. When I do, I understand.’ And computer-game mechanics can be inspired directly by science. Study it well, and you can invent game mechanics that allow you to engage with and learn about your own reality in a way you can’t when simply watching films or reading books.”

So says Raphael Granier de Cassagnac, a research director at France’s CNRS and Ecole Polytechnique, as well as member of the CMS collaboration at the CMS. Granier de Cassagnac is also the creative director of Exographer, a science-fiction computer game that draws on concepts from particle physics and is available on Steam, Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox.

“To some extent, it’s not too different from working at a place like CMS, which is also a super complicated object,” explains Granier de Cassagnac. Developing a game often requires graphic artists, sound designers, programmers and science advisors. To keep a detector like CMS running, you need engineers, computer scientists, accelerator physicists and funding agencies. And that’s to name just a few. Even if you are not the primary game designer or principal investigator, understanding the
fundamentals is crucial to keep the project running efficiently.

Root skills

Most physicists already have some familiarity with structured programming and data handling, which eases the transition into game development. Just as tools like ROOT and Geant4 serve as libraries for analysing particle collisions, game engines such as Unreal, Unity or Godot provide a foundation for building games. Prebuilt functionalities are used to refine the game mechanics.

“Physicists are trained to have an analytical mind, which helps when it comes to organising a game’s software,” explains Granier de Cassagnac. “The engine is merely one big library, and you never have to code anything super complicated, you just need to know how to use the building blocks you have and code in smaller sections to optimise the engine itself.”

While coding is an essential skill for game production, it is not enough to create a compelling game. Game design demands storytelling, character development and world-building. Structure, coherence and the ability to guide an audience through complex information are also required.

“Some games are character-driven, others focus more on the adventure or world-building,” says Granier de Cassagnac. “I’ve always enjoyed reading science fiction and playing role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, so writing for me came naturally.”

Entrepreneurship and collaboration are also key skills, as it is increasingly rare for developers to create games independently. Universities and startup incubators can provide valuable support through funding and mentorship. Incubators can help connect entrepreneurs with industry experts, and bridge the gap between scientific research and commercial viability.

“Managing a creative studio and a company, as well as selling the game, was entirely new for me,” recalls Granier de Cassagnac. “While working at CMS, we always had long deadlines and low pressure. Physicists are usually not prepared for the speed of the industry at all. Specialised offices in most universities can help with valorisation – taking scientific research and putting it on the market. You cannot forget that your academic institutions are still part of your support network.”

Though challenging to break into, opportunity abounds for those willing to upskill

The industry is fiercely competitive, with more games being released than players can consume, but a well-crafted game with a unique vision can still break through. A common mistake made by first-time developers is releasing their game too early. No matter how innovative the concept or engaging the mechanics, a game riddled with bugs frustrates players and damages its reputation. Even with strong marketing, a rushed release can lead to negative reviews and refunds – sometimes sinking a project entirely.

“In this industry, time is money and money is time,” explains Granier de Cassagnac. But though challenging to break into, opportunity abounds for those willing to upskill, with the gaming industry worth almost $200 billion a year and reaching more than three billion players worldwide by Granier de Cassagnac’s estimation. The most important aspects for making a successful game are originality, creativity, marketing and knowing the engine, he says.

“Learning must always be part of the process; without it we cannot improve,” adds Granier de Cassagnac, referring to his own upskilling for the company’s next project, which will be even more ambitious in its scientific coverage. “In the next game we want to explore the world as we know it, from the Big Bang to the rise of technology. We want to tell the story of humankind.”

The post Game on for physicists appeared first on CERN Courier.

Ten years ago, Zhang helped organise the first CERN Webfest, a hackathon that explores creative uses of technology for science and society. Webfest helped Zhang develop his coding skills and knowledge of physics by applying it to something beyond his own discipline. He also made long-lasting connections with teammates, who were from different academic backgrounds and all over the world. After participating in more hackathons, Zhang’s growing “hacker spirit” inspired him to start his own company. In 2024 Zhang returned to Webfest not as a participant, but as the CEO of DoraHacks.

Hackathons are social coding events often spanning multiple days. They are inclusive and open – no academic institution or corporate backing is required – making them accessible to a diverse range of talented individuals. Participants work in teams, pooling their skills to tackle technical problems through software, hardware or a business plan for a new product. Physicists, computer scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs all bring their strengths to the table. Young scientists can pursue work that may not fit within typical research structures, develop their skills, and build portfolios and professional networks.

“If you’re really passionate about some­thing, you should be able to jump on a project and work on it,” says Zhang. “You shouldn’t need to be associated with a university or have a PhD to pursue it.”

For early-career researchers, hackathons offer more than just technical challenges. They provide an alternative entry point into research and industry, bridging the gap between academia and real-world applications. University-run hackathons often attract corporate sponsors, giving them the budget to rent out stadiums with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of attendees.

“These large-scale hackathons really capture the attention of headhunters and mentors from industry,” explains Zhang. “They see the events as a recruitment pool. It can be a really effective way to advance careers and speak to representatives of big companies, as well as enhancing your coding skills.”

In the 2010s, weekend hackathons served as Zhang’s stepping stone into entrepreneurship. “I used to sit in the computer-science common room and work on my hacks. That’s how I met most of my friends,” recalled Zhang. “But later I realised that to build something great, I had to effectively organise people and capital. So I started to skip my computer-science classes and sneak into the business classrooms.” Zhang would hide in the back row of the business lectures, plotting his plan towards entrepreneurship. He networked with peers to evaluate different business models each day. “It was fun to combine our knowledge of engineering and business theory,” he added. “It made the journey a lot less stressful.”

But the transition from science to entrepreneurship was hard. “At the start you must learn and do everything yourself. The good thing is you’re exposed to lots of new skills and new people, but you also have to force yourself to do things you’re not usually good at.”

This is a dilemma many entrepreneurs face: whether to learn new skills from scratch, or to find business partners and delegate tasks. But finding trustworthy business partners is not always easy, and making the wrong decision can hinder the start up’s progress. That’s why planning the company’s vision and mission from the start is so important.

“The solution is actually pretty straight forward,” says Zhang. “You need to spend more time completing the important milestones yourself, to ensure you have a feasible product. Once you make the business plan and vision clear, you get support from everywhere.”

Decentralised community governance

Rather than hackathon participants competing for a week before abandoning their code, Zhang started DoraHacks to give teams from all over the world a chance to turn their ideas into fully developed products. “I want hackathons to be more than a recruitment tool,” he explains. “They should foster open-source development and decentralised community governance. Today, a hacker from Tanzania can collaborate virtually with a team in the US, and teams gain support to develop real products. This helps make tech fields much more diverse and accessible.”

Zhang’s company enables this by reducing logistical costs for organisers and providing funding mechanisms for participants, making hackathons accessible to aspiring researchers beyond academic institutions. As the community expands, new doors open for young scientists at the start of their careers.

“The business model is changing,” says Zhang. Hackathons are becoming fundamental to emerging technologies, particularly in areas like quantum computing, blockchain and AI, which often start out open source. “There will be a major shift in the process of product creation. Instead of building products in isolation, new technologies rely on platforms and infrastructure where hackers can contribute.”

Today, hackathons aren’t just about coding or networking – they’re about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, creating meaningful solutions and launching new career paths. They act as incubators for ideas with lasting impact. Zhang wants to help these ideas become reality. “The future of innovation is collaborative and open source,” he says. “The old world relies on corporations building moats around closed-source technology, which is inefficient and inaccessible. The new world is centred around open platform technology, where people can build on top of old projects. This collaborative spirit is what makes the hacker movement so important.”

The post The new hackerpreneur appeared first on CERN Courier.

High-school physics curricula don’t include much particle physics. The Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition seeks to remedy this by offering high-school students the chance to turn CERN or DESY into their own laboratory. Since 2014, more than 20,000 students from 2750 teams in 108 countries have competed in BL4S, with 25 winning teams coming to the labs to perform experiments they planned from blackboard to beamline. Though, at 10 years old, the competition is still young, multiple career trajectories have already been influenced, with the impact radiating out into participants’ communities of origin.

For Hiroki Kozuki, a member of a winning team from Switzerland in 2020, learning the fundamentals of particle physics while constructing his team’s project proposal was what first sparked his interest in the subject.

“Our mentor gave us after-school classes on particle physics, fundamentals, quantum mechanics and special relativity,” says Kozuki. “I really felt as though there was so much more depth to physics. I still remember this one lecture where he taught us about the fundamental forces and quarks… It’s like he just pulled the tablecloth out from under my feet. I thought: nature is so much more beautiful when I see all these mechanisms underneath it that I didn’t know existed. That’s the moment where I got hooked on particle physics.” Kozuki will soon graduate from Imperial College London, and hopes to pursue a career in research.

Sabrina Giorgetti, from an Italian team, tells a similar story. “I can say confidently that the reason I chose physics for my bachelor’s, master’s and PhD was because of this experience.” One of the competition’s earliest winners from back in 2015, Giorgetti is now working on the CMS experiment for her PhD. One of her most memorable experiences from BL4S was getting to know the other winning team, who were from South Africa. This solidified her decision to pursue a career in academia.

“You really feel like you can reach out and collaborate with people all over the world, which is something I find truly amazing,” she says. “Now it’s even more international than it was nine years ago. I learnt at BL4S that if you’re interested in research at a place like CERN, it’s not only about physics. It may look like that from the outside, but it’s also engineering, IT and science communication – it’s a very broad world.”

The power of collaboration

As well as getting hands-on with the equipment, one of the primary aims of BL4S is to encourage students to collaborate in a way they wouldn’t in a typical high-school context. While physics experiments in school are usually conducted in pairs, BL4S allows students to work in larger teams, as is common in professional and research environments. The competition provides the chance to explore uncharted territory, rather than repeating timeworn experiments in school.

2023 winner Isabella Vesely from the US is now majoring in physics, electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Alongside trying to fix their experiment prior to running it on the beamline, her most impactful memories involve collaborating with the other winning team from Pakistan. “We overcame so many challenges with collaboration,” explains Vesely. “They were from a completely different background to us, and it was very cool to talk to them about the experiment, our shared interest in physics and get to know each other personally. I’m still in touch with them now.”

One fellow 2023 winner is just down the road at Harvard. Zohaib Abbas, a member of the winning Pakistan team that year, is now majoring in physics. “In Pakistan, there weren’t any physical laboratories, so nothing was hands-on and all the physics was theoretical,” he says, recalling his shock at the US team’s technical skills, which included 3D printing and coding. After his education, Abbas wants to bring some of this knowledge back to Pakistan in the hopes of growing the physics community in his hometown. “After I got into BL4S, there have been hundreds of people in Pakistan who have been reaching out to me because they didn’t know about this opportunity. I think that BL4S is doing a really great job at exposing people to particle physics.”

All of the students recalled the significant challenge of ensuring the functionality of their instruments across one of CERN’s or DESY’s beamlines. While the project seemed a daunting task at first, the participants enjoyed following the process from start to finish, from the initial idea through to the data collection and analysis.

“It was really exciting to see the whole process in such a short timescale,” said Vesely. “It’s pretty complicated seeing all the work that’s already been done at these experiments, so it’s really cool to contribute a small piece of data and integrate that with everything else.”

Kozuki concurs. Though only he went on to study physics, with teammates branching off into subjects ranging from mathematics to law and medicine, they still plan to get together and take another crack at the data they compiled in 2020. “We want to take another look and see if we find anything we didn’t see before. These projects go on far beyond those two weeks, and the team that you worked with are forever connected.”

For Kozuki, it’s all about collaboration. “I want to be in a field where everyone shares this fundamental desire to crack open some mysteries about the universe. I think that this incremental contribution to science is a very noble motivation. It’s one I really felt when working at CERN. Everyone is genuinely so excited to do their work, and it’s such an encouraging environment. I learnt so much about particle physics, the accelerators and the detectors, but I think those are somewhat secondary compared to the interpersonal connections I developed at BL4S. These are the sorts of international collaborations that accelerate science, and it’s something I want to be a part of.”

The post From blackboard to beamline appeared first on CERN Courier.

Some time ago, British Columbia removed provincial examinations, giving teachers a bit more freedom to make additions to their curricula. I chose to insert small one- or two-day units throughout the year, which give my students multiple exposure to modern physics topics. These short introductions over a two-year period mean that physics students don’t need to know all the fine details, which decreases their stress and concerns.

Knowledge sharing

Physics teachers are lucky to have access to high-quality professional development via workshops run by CERN, LIGO, the Perimeter Institute (which produces excellent resources for use in physics classes) and others. These often-week-long events give teachers an overview of how a given research facility works, in the hope that they will bring that knowledge back to their students. Along the way, the teachers attend lectures from leading researchers and see first-hand careers in the field that they can bring back to share with their class.

I have been fortunate enough to attend workshops at these facilities. I have also taken part in a research experience at SNOLAB, brought students on tours of TRIUMF and mentored my students as they conducted research at the Canadian Light Source. All these experiences have given me the knowledge and confidence to introduce the facilities and the work done at them to my students in a way that hopefully piques their curiosity.

The pieces provide a starting point for conversations around what these decommissioned parts were used for and the kind of science they supported

While at CERN for the 2019 international teacher programme, I had the opportunity to visit both the CMS and ALICE detectors and to attend lectures from renowned particle physicists. We spent time in S’Cool LAB and visited many of the behind-the-scenes parts of CERN. While all of these experiences left an imprint on my teaching, it was during quiet visits to what was then called the Microcosm garden – which hosts decommissioned pieces of accelerators and detectors as a form of art – that helped transform the physical space in my classroom.

In 2022 my school in British Columbia renovated a large, old classroom to become our new physics lab. Knowing that I had more space to work with than before, I was inspired to start building my own version of the Microcosm garden on my classroom walls. I soon connected with the outreach team at TRIUMF who were excited to help get my project started with a photomultiplier tube, a control panel from a xenon-gas handling system, a paddle scintillator and a light guide. Since then, I have added a Lucas cell from SNOLAB, a piece of the electron gun from the Canadian Light Source and, most recently, a small-strip half-gap prototype from the New Small Wheel upgrade of the ATLAS detector. The pieces provide a starting point for conversations with students around what these decommissioned parts were used for, and the kind of science they supported.

Equipped with some knowledge of what modern research in the field looks like, I have successfully built a system where I am able to inspire students to want to study physics. Since attending my first major workshop in 2018, I have seen an increase in the number of students entering physics majors. Some of them have already gone on to internships at CERN and TRIUMF, after getting their first exposure to these organisations in my classes. My hope is that by having pieces of the facilities I talk about displayed on my classroom walls, this will further inspire more of my students to want to learn about them, possibly setting them on paths to careers in physics.

The post I built a physics museum in my classroom appeared first on CERN Courier.

To help overcome these barriers, in 2022 the US CMS collaboration designed a pilot programme called PURSUE – the Program for Undergraduate Research Summer Experience. Due to the COVID pandemic, the collaboration initially worked virtually with 16 students, before an in-person pilot was launched in 2023. The programme has changed the career paths of several students, and a third edition with 20 undergraduates is now underway.

The power of collaboration

Two thirds of the HEP workforce go on to develop careers outside the field. The skills developed in HEP can lead to careers in many sectors, from software and electronics to health and finance. With skills-based labour markets currently a hot topic in business, a more guided and organised approach towards skills has the potential to reinforce the workforce pipeline for both HEP and industry, and benefit the many young researchers who look for jobs outside of academia.

The LHC experiments are a perfect seedbed for this. Comprising some 1200 physicists, graduate students, engineers, technicians and computer scientists from 55 universities and institutes, the US CMS collaboration each year trains about 200 students, 100 postdocs and produces 45 PhDs. It is therefore in a strong position to provide pathways to involve many young researchers in every aspect of the experiment and to prepare hundreds of next-generation scientists for careers in physics and industry alike.

The PURSUE undergraduate internship offers opportunities in state-of-art detector design and upgrades, operations, novel techniques in data taking and analysis, scientific presentations and international partnerships. It doesn’t matter if you are a US citizen or not. The basic requirement is that you are a student inside the US. This year’s cohort comprises students from Africa, South and Central America, and Asia.

This one-of-its-kind programme relies on a large team of dedicated collaborators

At the start of each year, invitations are sent out to all US CMS institutes asking them to propose projects and mentors. This year almost 30 applications were received, which were then matched as closely as possible to the individual interests of the students. Being a diverse and sprawling collaboration – rather than a single institution – is an attractive part of the programme.

At the beginning of the internship, all students meet at the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab for two weeks of software training, during which they gain skills in Unix, Python, machine learning and other areas that will equip them in any research area and throughout industry. This part of PURSUE was developed within the framework of the IRIS-HEP project, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation to address the computing challenges of the High-Luminosity LHC, and the CERN-based HEP Software Foundation. These skills are also key requirements for industry, with 42% of companies identifying AI and big data as a strategic priority for the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023.

During the remaining eight weeks of their internship, students travel to the US institution where their mentor is located. The students stay connected throughout this period via meetings and Zoom talks on physics and careers topics, and at the end of the programme they come together to produce a final presentation and poster. Some continue their research during the following semester, enabling a deeper dive into the field.

Success story

This one-of-its-kind programme relies on a large team of dedicated collaborators who take precious time out of their routines to battle the lack of diversity in HEP. And PURSUE’s interns are already succeeding. For example, from the 2022 cohort, Sneha Dixit has been admitted to graduate school at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to pursue doctoral research on the CMS experiment, and Gabriel Soto has taken up a PhD in accelerator physics at the University of California Davis.

PURSUE also provides a way to engage new institutes with HEP. The initial funding for the programme was provided by a US Department of Energy grant awarded to Tougaloo College in Mississippi along with Brown University, the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Wisconsin. Tougaloo College had no previous connection to particle physics, but it is now hoped that it will become a member of the US CMS collaboration.

The driving force behind PURSUE was Meenakshi Narain of Brown University, an inspirational leader and champion of diversity in CMS and beyond, who passed away in January last year. We hope that the programme inspires similar initiatives in other experiments, fields and regions.

The post How skills pursue diversity and inclusion appeared first on CERN Courier.

His new colleagues are a diverse bunch, including geologists, medical doctors, astrophysicists, biologists, biotechnologists, jet fighter pilots and helicopter pilots. His own background is as a physicist and systems engineer. Following academic work studying the effect of radiation on semiconductors, Uznański spent 12 years at CERN working on powering existing infrastructure and future projects such as the Future Circular Collider. He’s most proud of being a project leader in reliability engineering and helping to design and deploy a new radiation-tolerant power-converter control system to the entire LHC accelerator complex.

Preparing for orbit

For now, Uznański’s astronaut training is mostly theoretical, preparing him for the ISS’s orbit-trajectory control, thermal control, communications, data handling, guidance, navigation and power generation, where he has deep expertise. But lift-off may not be far away, and one of his reserve-astronaut colleagues, Marcus Wandt, is already sitting up in the ISS capsule.

“I had the chance, in January, to see him launch from Cape Canaveral. And then, thanks to my operational experience at CERN, being in the control room, I came back directly to Columbus Control Center in Munich. Throughout the whole mission, I was in the control room, to support the mission and learn what I might live through one day.”

Rather than expertise or physical fitness, Uznański sees curiosity as the golden thread for astronauts – not least because they have to be able to perform any type of experiment that is assigned to them. As a Polish astronaut, he will have responsibility for the scientific experiments that are intended to accompany his country’s first mission to the ISS, most likely in late 2024 or early 2025. Among 66 proposals from Polish institutes, a dozen or more are currently being considered to fly.

CERN is extremely open in terms of technologies and I very much identify myself with that

The experiments are as diverse as the astronauts’ professional backgrounds. One will non-invasively monitor astronauts’ brain activity to help develop human–machine interfaces for artificial limbs. Another – a radiation monitor developed at CERN – plays on the fact that shielded high-energy physics environments have a similar radiation environment to the ISS in low-earth orbit. Uznański hopes that this technology can be commercialised and become another example of the opportunities out there for budding space entrepreneurs.

“I think we are in a fascinating moment for space exploration,” he explains, pointing to the boom in the commercial sector since 2014. “Space technology has gotten really democratised and commercialised. And I think it opens up possibilities for all types of engineers who build systems with great ideas and great science.”

Open science is a hot topic here. It’s increasingly possible to access venture capital to develop related technologies, notes Uznański, and the challenge is to ensure that the science is used in an open manner. “There is a big overlap between CERN culture and ESA culture in this respect. CERN is extremely open in terms of technologies and I very much identify myself with that.”

However societies choose to shape the future of open science in space, the two organisations are already partnering on several projects devoted to the pure curiosity that is dear to Uznański’s heart. These range from Euclid’s study of dark energy (CERN Courier May/June 2023 p7) to the ongoing study of cosmic rays by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). With AMS due for an upgrade in 2026 (CERN Courier March/April 2024 p7), he cannot help but hope to be on that flight.

“If the opportunity arises, it’s a clear yes from me.”

The post Sabbatical in space appeared first on CERN Courier.

IceCube’s 5160 optical sensors positioned deep within the Antarctic ice detect around 100,000 neutrinos per year, some of which are the most energetic events ever recorded. To make sure that the detector is operational throughout the year, people are required to spend extended periods at the South Pole, where temperatures are on average around –60°C during the winter.

Marc Jacquart was one of two “winterovers” for IceCube during the season November 2022 to November 2023. Having completed his master’s degree, during which he analysed IceCube data, he saw an internal email about the position and applied: “It was a long-time dream-come-true. I had wanted to go to the South Pole since I heard about IceCube six years earlier.” First he had to pass medical tests, a routine requirement for winterovers because it is difficult to evacuate people during the winter. His next stop was the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the lead institution for the IceCube collaboration, where he and his colleague Hrvoje Dujmović received three months’ training on how to operate, troubleshoot, calibrate and repair IceCube’s hardware and software components using a small replica of the data centre. “Our job is to ensure the highest detector uptime, so we need to know how to fix a problem immediately if something breaks.”

The pair made their way to McMurdo Station on the shores of Antarctica closest to New Zealand in early November 2022. From there, a plane took them 1350 km to the Amundsen–Scott station, located 2835 m above sea level and only 150 m from the geographic South Pole. During the summer, up to 150 people stay at the station to make major repairs and upgrades to the research facilities, which also include the South Pole Telescope, BICEP and an atmospheric research observatory. By mid-February, most people leave. “We were only 43 winterovers left, and that’s when you can help each other and busy yourself with all kinds of things,” says Marc.

Part of station life is volunteering for teams, which in Marc’s case included the fire fighters, amongst others. To bide their time during a nearly six-month-long night, the inhabitants can go to the library, music room or grow vegetables in a repurposed biology experiment to freshen up the preserved foods. While winter in the Antarctic Circle is harsh outside, says Marc, it has one major highlight: the southern lights. “I remember one time, they were just dancing, moving and very bright. We stayed outside for a full hour packed in layers and layers of clothes!”

The only real downtime for the detector is when operators perform a full restart every 32 hours

As a winterover, Marc ensured that the IceCube detector worked 24/7 and recorded every incoming neutrino. “Usually, we have 99.9% uptime. If there is something wrong, we have a pager that pings us, even in the middle of the night.” To ensure that the rarest high-energy neutrinos are recorded, the only real downtime for the detector, he says, is when operators perform a full restart every 32 hours. For such events, which could point to high-energy phenomena in the universe, IceCube sends a real-time alert to other experiments. About 200 machines are located in the data centre and collect 1 TB of data per day, only 10% of which are sent north to a data centre in the US due to satellite-bandwidth limitations. The remaining data gets stored on hard drives, which must be swapped manually by the winterovers every two weeks. During the summer, when aircraft can reach the South Pole on a regular basis, boxes stashed with hard drives are taken back for thorough data analysis and archiving.

Since returning home to Switzerland, Marc is considering his next steps. “I have the opportunity to work on a radio observatory in the US next year. After a year operating the IceCube detector, I’m interested to work with hardware more. And I am definitely considering a PhD with IceCube afterwards, as there is a lot coming up.” Currently, the IceCube collaboration is working towards IceCube-Gen2, with the first step being to add seven strings with improved optical modules to the existing underground complex. In a second step, 120 further cables with refined light sensors will optimise the detector, and two radio detectors as well as an extended array will be placed on the surface. The upgrades will enlarge IceCube’s coverage from one to eight cubic kilometres, offering more than enough tasks for future winterovers during the decade . “Maybe in a few years I would be keen to return to the South Pole. It’s a very special place.”

The post The coolest job in physics appeared first on CERN Courier.

Large-experiment collaborations such as those at the LHC achieve remarkable feats. Indeed, social scientists have praised our ability to coordinate thousands of researchers with limited “power” while retaining individual independence. Similarly, as we continuously optimise experiments for performance and quality, and there also exist opportunities to refine behaviours and practices to facilitate progress and collective success.

A voice for all

Hierarchies in any organisation can inadvertently become a barrier rather than a facilitator of open idea exchange. Often, decision-making is confined to higher levels, reducing the agency of those implementing actions and leading to disconnects in roles and responsibilities. Excellence in physics doesn’t guarantee the interpersonal skills that are essential for inspiring teams. Moreover, imposter syndrome infects us all, especially junior collaborators who may lack soft-skills training. While striving for diversity we sometimes overlook the need to embrace different personality types, which, for example, can make large meetings daunting for the less outspoken. Good leadership can help navigate these challenges, ensuring that every voice contributes to our collective progress.

Leadership is not management (using resources to get a particular job done), nor is it rank (merely a line on a CV). It is guidance and influence of others towards a shared vision – a pivotal force as essential as any tool in our research arsenal. Good leadership is a combination of strategic foresight, emotional intelligence and adaptive communication; it creates an inclusive environment where individual contributions are not commanded but empowered. These practices would improve any collaboration. In large physics experiments this type of leadership is incidental instead of being broadly acknowledged and pursued.

Luckily, leadership is a skill that can be taught and developed through training. True training is a craft and is best delivered by experts who are not just versed in theory but are also skilled practitioners. Launched in autumn 2023 based on the innovative training approach of Resilient Leaders Elements, a new course “Leading in Collaborations” is tailored specifically for our community. The three-month expert-facilitated course includes four half-day workshops and two one-hour clinics, addressing two main themes: “what I do”, which equips participants with decision-making skills to set clear goals and navigate the path to achieving them; and “who I am”, which encourages participants to channel their emotions positively and motivate both themselves and others effectively. The course confronts participants with the question “What is leadership in a large physics collaboration?” and provides a new framework of concepts. Through self-assessment, peer-feedback sessions, individualised challenges and buddy-coaching, participants are able to identify blind spots and hidden talents. A final assessment shows measurable change in each skill.

The first cohort of 20 participants, displaying a diverse mix of physics experience from various institutions and nationalities, was welcomed to the programme at University College London on 14 and 15 November 2023. More than half of the participants were women – in line with the programme’s aim to ensure that those often overshadowed are given the visibility and support to become more impactful leaders. The lead facilitator, Chris Russell, masterfully connected with the audience via his technical physics background and proceeded to build trust and impart knowledge in an open and supportive atmosphere. When discussing leadership, the initial examples given cited military and political figures; reframing led to a participant’s description of a conductor giving their orchestra space to play through an often-rehearsed tough section as an example of great leadership.

Crucial catalyst

Building on the experience of the first cohort, the aim is to offer the programme more broadly so that we can encourage common practice and change the culture of leadership in large collaborations. Given that the LHC hosts the largest collaborations in physics, the programme also hopes to find a home within CERN’s learning and development portfolio.

The Leading in Collaborations programme is a crucial catalyst in the endeavour to ensure that our precious resources are wielded with precision and purpose, and thus to amplify our collective capacity for discovery. Join the leadership revolution by being the leader you wish you had, no matter your rank. Together, we will become the cultural vanguard!

The post Leading in collaborations appeared first on CERN Courier.

Inspired by CERN

It was during this time that Matteo visited CERN. The experience left him with a strong desire to work there but he felt it was an unattainable ambition. Nevertheless, in 2011 he applied for a position through the “Volontaires Internationaux” programme and was successful. He joined the physics department in 2012 as a fellow, testing commercial equipment used in the backend electronics for CERN experiments. A year later he obtained a staff contract with increased responsibilities, including managing a team of around five and hiring people. Making use of CERN’s internal mobility programme, he then joined the electrical power converter group in the technology department and spent six years working with a multicultural team of 15 people. “CERN is the greatest example of a united Europe, as the incarnation of teamwork no matter what language or nationality,” he says, adding that his experience has undoubtedly affected his personality. “It left me with the sensation that I can no longer be in an environment that is not diverse.”

Finally, in 2018, the knowledge that Matteo had acquired at CERN enabled him to realise his teenage ambition, and he built his own synthesiser: the “tiny synth”, based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). At the time, there were no other products on the market using this technology. Subsequently, he was contacted by the CEO of the organisation he works for today, who was looking for an engineer. Matteo was not ready to leave CERN so he asked the human resources department if he could work as a contractor alongside his job. The request was accepted as there was no conflict of interest.

Invest time in acquiring the skills relevant for your sector, but don’t forget to also spend some time thinking about where you are going

Four years into his dual role, however, Matteo began to reconsider his position. He wanted a job more centred on managing people, in the private sector and that was more focused on profitability. “I was very confident in my work, and I also appreciated my colleagues, but at the same time I think I had reached a ‘plateau’ of knowledge, so I felt I was not able to move forward.” Initially, he struggled with the decision whether to leave CERN. He turned to the CERN Alumni Network to find members who had held indefinite contracts at CERN but chose to pursue a career elsewhere. He met with three such people who took the time to listen and share their experiences, but it was a conversation with a colleague that brought him to the realisation that he needed a change. “One of my best friends asked me ‘are you happy?’ and I was not able to answer.”

Matteo left CERN in 2020 after eight enjoyable years, forever grateful of what it taught him. He is now based in Bari, Italy, where he works with people from around the world as an innovation leader at Music Tribe, delivering audio products for DJs and music producers.

As for his advice to others: “Invest time in acquiring the necessary skills relevant for your sector, but don’t forget to also spend some time thinking about where you are going. I was working all the time, developing electronics. But I forgot to ask myself if I am in the right place doing the right thing. We should all spend some time not only working, but on introspection.”

The post Mixing physics and music appeared first on CERN Courier.

“The military is extremely interested in autonomous vehicles,” explains Jack. “But removing the driver from, say, a fleet of tanks, increases the number of breakdowns: many maintenance checks are triggered by the driver noticing, for example, a ‘funny noise on start-up’, or ‘a smell of oil in the cabin’.” Jack worked on trying to replicate this intuition by using very early signs in sensor signals. Such a capability permits high confidence in mission success, he adds. “It also ensures that during a mission, if circumstances change, dynamic asset information is available for reconfiguration.”

Working in defence was “exciting and fast- paced” and enabled Jack to see his research put to practical use – he got to drive a tank and attend firing tests on a naval frigate. “It’s especially interesting because the world of defence is something most people don’t have visibility on. Modern warfare is constantly evolving based on technology, but also politics and current affairs, and being on the cusp of that is really fascinating.” It also left him with a wealth of transferrable skills: “Defence is a high-performance world where product failure is not an option. This is hardcoded into the organisation from the bottom up.”

Back to his roots

Growing up in Geneva, CERN always had a mythical status for Jack as the epitome of science and exploration. In 2022 he applied for a senior fellowship. “Just getting interviewed for this fellowship was a huge moment for me,” he says. “I was lucky enough to get interviewed in person, and when I arrived I got a visitor pass with the CERN-logo lanyards attached. Even if I didn’t get the job I was going to frame it, just to remember being interviewed at CERN!”

I love the idea of working on the frontiers of science and human understanding

Jack now works on the “availability challenge” for the proposed Future Circular Collider FCC-ee. Availability is the percentage of scheduled physics days the machine is able to deliver beam, (i.e. is not down for repair). To meet physics goals, this must be 80%. The LHC – the world’s largest and most complex accelerator, but still a factor three smaller and simpler than the FCC – had an availability of 77% during Run 2. “Modern-day energy-frontier particle colliders aren’t built to the availabilities we would need to succeed with the FCC, and that’s without considering  additional technical challenges,” notes Jack. His research aims to break down this problem system by system and find solutions, beginning with the radio frequency (RF). 

On the back of an envelope, he says, the statistics are a concern: “The LHC has 16 superconducting RF cavities, which trip about once every five days. If we scale this up to FCC-ee numbers (136 cavities for the Z-pole energy mode and 1352 for the tt threshold), this becomes problematic. Orders of magnitude greater reliability is required, and that itself is a defining technical challenge.

Jack’s background in defence prepared him well for this task: “Both are systems that cannot afford to fail, and therefore have extremely tight reliability requirements. One hour of down time in the LHC is extremely costly, and the FCC will be no different.”

Mirroring what he did at Babcock, one solution could be fault prediction. Others are robot maintenance, and various hardware solutions to make the RF circuit more reliable. “Generally speaking, I love the idea of working on the frontiers of science and human understanding. I find this exploration extremely exciting, and I’m delighted to be a part of it.”

The post Fault-finding across sectors appeared first on CERN Courier.

Audrey is one of the newest additions to the MME group, which provides specific engineering solutions combining mechanical design, fabrication and material sciences for accelerator components and physics detectors to the CERN community. She joined the forming and welding section as a fellow in January 2023, having previously studied metallurgy in the engineering school at Polytech Nantes in France. “While in school, I did an internship in Toulon, where they build submarines for the army. I was in a group with a welder, who passed on his passion for welding to me – especially when applied in demanding applications.”

Extreme conditions

What sets welding at CERN apart are the variety of materials used and the environments the finished parts have to withstand. Radioactivity, high pressure to ultra-high vacuum and cryogenic temperatures are all factors to which the materials are exposed. Stainless steel is the most frequently used material, says Audrey, but rarer ones like niobium also come into play. “You don’t really find niobium for welding outside CERN – it is very specific, so it’s interesting and challenging to study niobium welds. To keep the purity of this material in particular, we have to apply a special vacuum welding process using an electron beam.” The same is true for titanium, which is a material of choice for its low density and high mechanical properties. It is currently under study for the next-generation HL-LHC beam dump. Whether it’s steel, titanium, copper, niobium or aluminium, each material has a unique metallurgical behaviour that will greatly influence the welding process. To meet the strict operating conditions over the lifetime of the components, the welding parameters are developed consequently, and rigorous control of the quality and traceability are essential.

“Although it is the job of the physicists at CERN to come up with the innovative machines they need to push knowledge further, it is an interesting exchange to learn from each other, juggling between ideal objects and industrial realities,” explains Audrey. “It is a matter of adaptation. The physicists come here and explain what they need and then we see if it’s feasible with our machines. If not, we can adapt the design or material, and the physicists are usually quite open to the change.”

Touring the main CERN workshop – which was one of CERN’s first buildings and has been in service since 1957 – Audrey is one of the few women present. “We are a handful of women graduating as International Welding Engineers (IWE). I am proud to be part of the greater scientific community and to promote my job in this domain, historically dominated by men.”

The physicists come here and explain what they need and then we see if it’s feasible with our machines

In the main workshop at CERN, Audrey is, along with her colleagues, a member of the welding experts’ team. “My daily task is to support welding activities for current fabrication projects CERN-wide. On a typical day, I can go from performing visual inspections of welds in the workshop to overseeing the welding quality, advising the CERN community according to the most recent standards, participating in large R&D projects and, as a welding expert, advising the CERN community in areas such as the framework of the pressure equipment directive.”

Together with colleagues from CERN’s vacuum, surfaces and coatings group (TE-VSC), and MME, Audrey is currently working on R&D for the Einstein Telescope – a proposed next-generation gravitational-wave observatory in Europe. It is part of a new collaboration between CERN, Nikhef and the INFN to design the telescope’s colossal vacuum system – the largest ever attempted (see CERN shares beampipe know-how for gravitational-wave observatories). To undertake this task, the collaboration is initially investigating different materials to find the best candidate combining ultra-high vacuum compatibility, weldability and cost efficiency. So far, one fully prototyped beampipe has been finished using stainless steel and another is in production with common steel; the third is yet to be done. The next main step will then be to go from the current 3 m-long prototype to a 50 m version, which will take about a year and a half. Audrey’s task is to work with the welders to optimise the welding parameters and ultimately provide a robust industrial solution to manufacture this giant vacuum chamber. “The design is unusual; it has not been used in any industrial application, at least not at this quality. I am very excited to work on the Einstein Telescope. Gravitational waves have always interested me, and it is great to be part of the next big experiment at such an early stage.”

The post A soft spot for heavy metal appeared first on CERN Courier.

What got you into physics?

I have always been interested in what one might call existential questions: those that were originally theological or philosophical, but are now science, such as “why are things the way they are?” When I was young, for me it was a toss-up: do I go into particle physics or cosmology? At the time, experimental cosmology was less developed, so it made sense to go towards particle physics.

What has been your research focus?

When I was a graduate student in college, I was intrigued by the idea of quantum mechanical spin. I didn’t understand spin and I still don’t. It’s a perplexing and non-intuitive concept. It turned out the university I went to was working on it. When I got there, however, I ended up doing a fixed-target jet-photoproduction experiment. My thesis experiment was small, but it was a wonderful training ground because I was able to do everything. I built the experiment, wrote the data acquisition and all of the analysis software. Then I got back on track with the big questions, so colliders with the highest energies were the way to go. Back then it was the Tevatron and I joined DØ. When the LHC came online it was an opportunity to transition to CMS.

Why and when did you decide to get into communication?

It has to do with my family background. Many physicists come from families where one or both parents are already from the field. But I come from an academically impoverished, blue-collar background, so I had no direct mentors for physics. However, I was able to read popular books from the generation before me, by figures such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov or George Gamow. They guided me into science. I’m essentially paying that back. I feel it’s sort of my duty because I have some skill at it and because I expect that there is some young person in some small town who is in a similar position as I was in, who doesn’t know that they want to be a scientist. And, frankly, I enjoy it. I am also worried about the antiscience sentiment I see in society, from the antivaccine movement to climate-change denial to 5G radiation fears. If scientists do not speak up, the antiscience voices are the only ones that will be heard. And if public policy is based on these false narratives, the damage to society can be severe. 

Scientists doing outreach create goodwill, which can lead to better funding for research-focused scientists

How did you start doing YouTube videos?

I had got to a point in my career where I was fairly established, and I could credibly think of other things. When you’re young, you are urged to focus entirely on research, because if you don’t, it could harm your research career. I had already been writing for Fermilab Today and I kept suggesting doing videos, as YouTube was becoming a thing. After a couple of years one of the videographers said, “You know, Don, you’re actually pretty good at explaining this stuff. We should do a video.” My first video came out a year before the Higgs discovery, in July 2011. It was on the Higgs boson. When the video came out, a few of the bigger science outlets picked it up and during the build-up to the Higgs excitement it got more and more views. By now it has more than three million clicks, which for a science channel is a lot. We do serious science in our videos, but there is also some light-heartedness in them.

Do you try to make the videos funny? 

This has more to do with me not taking anything seriously. I have found that irreverent humour can be disarming. People like to be entertained when they are learning. For example, one video was about “What was the real origin of mass?” Most people think that the Higgs boson is giving mass, but it’s really QCD. It’s the energy stored inside nucleons. In any event, in this video I start out with a joke about going into a Catholic church. The Higgs boson tries to say “I’m losing my faith,” and the priest replies: “You can’t leave the church. Without you how can we have mass?” For a lot of YouTube channels, viewership is not just about the material. It’s about the viewer liking the presenter. I’d say people who like our channel appreciate the combination of reliable science facts, but also subscribe for the humour. If a viewer doesn’t like a guy who does terrible dad jokes, they just go to another channel.

During the Covid-19 pandemic your videos switched to “Subatomic stories”. How do they differ?

Most of my videos are done in a studio on green screen so that we can put visuals in the background, but that was not possible during the lockdown. We then did a set up in my living room. I had an old DSLR camera and a recorder, and would record the video and the audio, then send the files to my videographer, Ian Krass, who does all the magic. Our usual videos don’t have a real story arc; they are just a series of topics. With “Subatomic stories” we began with a plan. I organised it as a sort of self-contained course, beginning with basic things, like the Standard Model, weak force, strong force, etc. Towards the end, we introduced more diverse, current research topics and a few esoteric theoretical ideas. Later, after Subatomic stories, I continued to film in my basement in a green-screen studio I built. We’ve returned to the Fermilab studio, but the basement one is waiting should the need arise. 

You are quite the public face of Fermilab. How does this relationship work?

It’s working wonderfully. I have no complaints. I can’t say that was always true in the past, because, when you’re young, you’re advised to focus on your research; it was like that for me. At the time there was some hostility towards science communicators. If you did outreach, you weren’t really considered a serious scientist, and that’s still true to a degree, although it is getting better. For me, it got to the point where people were just used to me doing it, and they tolerated it. As long as it didn’t bother my research, I could do this on my time. Some people bowl, some people knit, some people hike. I made videos. As I started becoming more successful, the laboratory started embracing the effort and even encouraged me to spend some of my work day on it. I was glad because in the same way that we encourage certain scientists to specialise in AI or computational skills or detector skills, I think that we as a field need to cultivate and encourage those scientists who are good at communicating our work. The bottom line is that I am very happy with the lab. I would like to see other laboratories encourage at least a small subset of scientists, those who are enthusiastic about outreach, to give them the time and the resources to do it, because there’s a huge payoff.

What are your favourite and least favourite things about doing outreach?

I think I’m making an impact. For instance, I’ve had graduate students or even postdocs ask me to autograph a book saying, “I went into physics because I read this book.” Occasionally I’m recognised in public, but the viewership numbers tell the story. If a video does poorly, it will get 50,000 viewers. And a good video, or maybe just a lucky one, can get millions. The message is getting out. As for the least favourite part, lately it is coming up with ideas. I’ve covered nearly every (hot) topic, so now I am thinking of revisiting early topics in a new way.

What would be your message to physicists who don’t have time or see the need for science communication?

Let’s start with the second type, who don’t see the value of it. I would like to remind them that essentially, in any country, if you want to do research, your funding comes from taxpayers. They work hard for their money and they certainly don’t want to pay taxes, so if you want to ask them to support this thing that you’re interested in, you need to convince them that it’s important and interesting. For those who don’t have time, I’m empathetic. Depending on your supervisor, doing science communication can harm a young career. However, in that case I think that the community should at least support a small group of people who do outreach. If nothing else, the scientists doing outreach create goodwill, which can lead to better funding for research-focused scientists.

Where do you see particle physics headed and the role of outreach?

The problem is that the Standard Model works well, but not perfectly. Consequently, we need to look for anomalies both at the LHC and with other precision experiments. I imagine that the next decade will resemble what we are doing now. I think it would be of very high value if we could spend some money on thinking about how to make stronger magnets and advanced acceleration technologies, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a very large increase in energy. The scientists know what to do. We are developing the techniques and technologies needed to move forward. On the communication side, we just need to remind the public that the questions particle physicists and cosmologists are trying to answer are timeless. They’re the questions many children ask. It’s a fascinating universe out there and a good science story can rekindle anyone’s sense of child-like wonder.

The post Physicist by day, YouTuber by night appeared first on CERN Courier.

Visiting CERN was an invaluable experience that led to lifelong connections. “Meeting people who worked on particle-physics missions always piqued my interest, as they had such interesting stories and experiences to share,” Valeria explains. “I collaborated and worked alongside people from different areas in cosmology and particle physics, and I got the opportunity to connect with scientists working in different experiments.”

After the fellowship, Valeria went to the University of Heidelberg as a research group leader, and during this time she was selected for the “Science to Data Science” programme by the AI software company Pivigo. Working on artificial intelligence and unsupervised learning to analyse healthcare data for a start-up company in London, it presented her with the opportunity to widen her skillset. 

Valeria’s career trajectory turned towards space science in 2007, when she began working for the Euclid mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) due to launch this year, with the aim to measure the geometry of the universe for the study of dark matter and energy. Currently co-lead of the Euclid theory science working group, Valeria has held a number of roles in the mission, including deputy manager of the communication group. In 2018 she became the CEA representative for Euclid–France communication and is currently director of research for the CEA astrophysics department/CosmoStat lab. She also worked on data analysis for ESA’s Planck mission from 2009 to 2018. 

Mentoring and networking 

In both research collaborations, Valeria worked on numerous projects that she coordinated from start to finish. While leading teams, she studied management with the goal of enabling everyone to reach their full potential. She also completed training in science diplomacy, which helped her gain valuable transferrable skills. “I decided to be proactive in developing my knowledge and started attending webinars, and then training on science diplomacy. I wanted to deepen my understanding on how science can have an impact on the world and society.” In 2022 Valeria was selected to participate in the first Science Diplomacy Immersion Programme organised by the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA), which aims to take advantage of the ecosystem of international organisations in Geneva to anticipate, accelerate and translate emerging scientific themes into concrete actions. 

I wanted to deepen my understanding on how science can have an impact on the world and society

Sharing experience and building connections between people have been a theme in Valeria’s career. Nowhere is this better illustrated than her role, since 2015, as a mentor for the Supernova Foundation – a worldwide mentoring and networking programme for women in physics. “Networking is very important in any career path and having the opportunity to encounter people from a diverse range of backgrounds allows you to grow your network both personally and professionally. The mentoring programme is open to all career levels. There are no barriers. It is a global network of people from 53 countries and there are approximately 300 women in the programme. I am convinced that it is a growing community that will continue to thrive.” Valeria has also acted as mentor for Femmes & Science (a French initiative by Paris-Saclay University) in 2021–2022, and was recently appointed as one of 100 mentors worldwide for #space4women, an initiative of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs to support women pursuing studies in space science.

A member of the CERN Alumni Network, Valeria thoroughly enjoys staying connected with CERN. “Not only is the CERN Alumni Network excellent for CERN as it brings together a wide range of people from many career paths, but it also provides an opportunity for its members to understand and learn how science can be used outside of academia.”

The post Sharing experience, building connections appeared first on CERN Courier.

While the motivations for leaving academia expressed by the speakers differed according to their personal stories, common themes emerged. The long time-scales of experimental physics coupled with job instability and the glacial pace of funding cycles for new projects, for example, sometimes led to demotivation, whereas the speakers found that industry had exciting shorter-term projects to explore. Several speakers sought a better work–life balance in subjects they could enthuse about, having previously experienced a sense of stagnation. Another factor related to that balance was the better ratio between salary and performance, and hours worked.

Case studies 

Caterina Deplano, formerly an ALICE experimentalist, and Giorgia Rauco, ex-CMS, described the personal constraints that led them to search for a job in the local area, and showed that this need not be a limiting factor. Both assessed their skills frankly and opted for further training in their target sectors: education and data science, respectively. Deplano’s path to teaching in Geneva led her to go back and study for four years, improving her French-language skills while obtaining a Swiss teaching qualification. The reward was apparent in the enthusiasm with which she talked about her students and her chosen career. Rauco explained how she came to contemplate life outside academia and talked participants through the application process, emphasising that finding the “right” employment fit had meant many months of work with frequent disappointments, the memory of which was erased by the final acceptance letter. Both speakers gave links to valuable resources for training and further education, and Rauco offered some top-tips for prospective transitioners: be excited for what is coming next, start as soon as possible if you are thinking about changing and don’t feel guilty about your choice.

Maria Elena Stramaglia, formerly ATLAS, described the anguish of deciding whether to stay in academia or go to industry, and her frank assessment of transferable skills weighed up against personal desires and her own work–life balance. Her decision to join Hitachi Energy was based on the right mix of personal and technical motivation, she said. In moving from LHCb to data science and management, Albert Puig Navarro joined a newly established department at Proton (the developers of ProtonMail, which was founded by former ATLAS members; CERN Courier September/October 2019 p53), in which he ended up being responsible for hiring a mix of data scientists, engineers and operations managers, conducting more than 200 interviews in the process. He discussed the pitfalls of over-confidence, the rather different requirements of the industrial sector, and the shift in motivations between pure science and industry. Cécile Deterre, a former ATLAS physicist now working on technology for sustainable fish farming, focussed on CV-writing for industrial job applications, during which she emphasised transferable skills and how to make your technical experience more accessible to future employers.

With one foot still firmly in particle physics, Alex Winkler, formerly CMS, joined a company that makes X-ray detectors for medical, security and industrial applications; in a serendipitous exception among the speakers, he described how he was head-hunted while contemplating life beyond CERN, and mentioned the novel pressures implicit in working in a for-profit environment. Massimo Marino, ex-ATLAS, gave a lively talk about his experiences in a number of diverse environments: Apple, the World Economic Forum and the medical energy industries, to name a few. Diverting along the way to write a series of books, his talk covered the personal challenges and expectations in different roles and environments over a long career.

Throughout the evening, which culminated in a panel session, participants had the opportunity to quiz the speakers about their sectors and the personal decisions and processes that led them there. Head of CERN Alumni Relations Rachel Bray also explained how the Alumni Network can help facilitate contact between current CERN members and their predecessors who have left the field. The interest shown by the audience and the detailed testimonials of the speakers demonstrated that this event remains a vital source of information and encouragement for those considering a career transition.

The post How to find your feet in industry appeared first on CERN Courier.

In addition to describing the nature of their work and the skills acquired at CERN that have helped them make the transition, the panellists explained which new skills they had to develop after CERN for a successful career move. The around 180 participants who attended the online event received tips for interviews and CV-writing and heard personal stories about how a PhD prepares you for a career outside academia. 

The panellists agreed that metrics used in academia to qualify a person’s success, such as a PhD, the h-index, or the number of published papers, do not necessarily apply to roles outside of academia, except for research positions. “You don’t need to have a PhD or a certificate to demonstrate that you are a good problem solver or a good programmer – you should do a PhD because you are interested in the field,” said Cristina Bahamonde, who used to work in accelerator operations at CERN and now oversees and unblocks all Google’s network deployments as regional leader for its global network delivery team in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She considers her project-management and communication skills, which she acquired during her time at CERN while designing solution and mitigation strategies for operational changes in the LHC, essential for her current role. 

General skills needed for big-tech companies include the ability to learn and adapt fast, project and product-management skills, as well as communicating effectively to technical and non-technical audiences. Some participants were unaware that skills that they sharpened intuitively throughout their academic career are vital for a career outside.

“CERN taught me how to be a generalist,” says James Casey, now a group programme manager at Microsoft. “I was not working as a product manager at CERN, but you do very similar work at CERN because you write documents, build customer relationships and need to communicate your work in an understandable way as well as to communicate the work that needs to be done.” At CERN in 1994, Casey worked as a summer student alongside the original team that developed the web. After having worked in start-ups, he returned to CERN for a while and then moved back to industry in 2011.

Finding the narrative

Finding your own narrative and presenting it in the right way on a resumé is not always easy. “When I write my resumé, it looks really straight forward,” said Mariana Rihl, former LHCb experimentalist and now Meta’s product-system validation lead for verifying and validating Oculus VR products. “But only after a certain time, I realised that a common theme emerged — testing hardware and understanding users’ needs.” Working on the LHCb beam-gas vertex detector and especially ensuring the functionality of detector hardware prepared her well, she said. 

Former CERN openlab intern Ritika Kanade, who now works as a software engineer at Apple, shared her experience of interviewing people applying for software engineering roles. “What I like to see during an interview is how the applicant approaches the tasks and how he or she interacts with me. It’s ok if someone needs help. That’s normal in our job,” she adds. “Time management is one thing I see many candidates struggle with.” Other skills needed in industry as well as in academia are tenacity and persistence. Often, candidates need to apply more than three times to land a job at their favourite company. “I applied six or seven times before I was invited for an interview at Google,” emphasised Bahamonde.

The Moving out of academia series provides a rich source of advice for those seeking to make a career change, with the latest event following  others dedicated to careers in finance, industrial engineering, big data, entrepreneurship, the environment and medical technologies. “This CERN Alumni event demonstrated once more the impact of high-energy physics on society and that people transitioning from academia to industry bring fresh insights from another field,” said Rachel Bray, head of CERN Alumni relations.

The post Moving from big science into big tech appeared first on CERN Courier.

Twenty-five years later, Hegelich founded TAU Systems to do just that. In September the US-based firm secured a $15 million investment to build a commercial laser-driven particle accelerator. The target application is X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), only a handful of which exist worldwide due to the need for large radio-frequency linacs to accelerate electrons. Laser-driven acceleration could drastically reduce the size and cost of XFELs, says Hegelich, and offers many other applications such as medical imaging. 

Beam time

“As a commercial customer it is difficult to get time on the European XFEL at DESY or the LCLS at SLAC, but these are absolutely fantastic machines that show you biological and chemical interactions that you can’t see in any other way,” he explains. “TAU Systems’ business model is two-pronged: we will offer beam time, data acquisition and analysis as a full-service supplier as well as complete laser-driven accelerators and XFEL systems for sale to, among others, pharma and biotech, battery and solar technology, and other material-science-driven markets.”  

Laser-driven accelerators begin by firing an intense laser pulse at a gas target to excite plasma waves, upon which charged particles can “surf” and gain energy. Researchers worldwide have been pursuing the idea for more than two decades, demonstrating impressive accelerating gradients. CERN’s AWAKE experiment, meanwhile, is exploring the use of proton-driven plasmas that would enable even greater gradients. The challenge is to be able to extract a stable and reliable beam that is useful for applications.

Hegelich began studying the interaction between ultra-intense electromagnetic fields and matter during his PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In 2002 he went to Los Alamos National Laboratory where he ended up leading their laser-acceleration group. A decade later, the University of Texas at Austin invited him to head up a group there. Hegelich has been on unpaid leave of absence since last year to focus on his company, which currently numbers 14 employees and rising. “We have got to a point where we think we can make a product rather than an experiment,” he explains. 

The breakthrough was to inject the gas target with nanoparticles with the right properties at the right time, so as to seed the wakefield sooner and thus enable a larger portion of the wave to be exploited. The resulting electron beam contains so much charge that it drives its own wave, capable of accelerating electrons to 10 GeV over a distance of just 10 cm, explains Hegelich. “The whole community has been chasing 10 GeV for a very long time, because if you ever wanted to build a big collider, or drive an XFEL, you’d need to put together 10 GeV acceleration stages. While gains were theorised, we saw something that was so much more powerful than what we were hoping for. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good!”

The breakthrough was to inject the gas target with nanoparticles with the right properties at the right time

Hegelich says he was also lucky to attract an investor, German internet entrepreneur Lukasz Gadowski, so soon after he started looking last summer. “This is hardware development: it takes a lot of capital just to get going. Lukasz and I met by accident when I was consulting on a totally different topic. He has invested $15 million and is very interested in the technical side.” 

TAU Systems (the name comes from the symbol used for the laser pulse duration) aims to offer its first products for sale in 2024, have an XFEL service centre operational by 2026 and start selling full XFEL systems by 2027. Improving beam stability will remain the short-term focus, says Hegelich. “At Texas we have a laser system that shoots once per hour or so, with no feedback loop, so sometimes you get a great shot and most of the time you don’t. But we have done some experiments in other regimes with smaller lasers, and other groups have done remarkable work here and shown that it is possible to run for three days straight. Now that we have this company, I can hire actual engineers and programmers – a luxury I simply didn’t have as a university professor.”

He also doesn’t rule out more fundamental applications such as high-energy physics. “I am not going to say that we will replace a collider with a laser, although if things take off and if there is a multibillion-dollar project, then you never know.”

The post Taking plasma accelerators to market appeared first on CERN Courier.

Do you remember the first time you heard about CERN? The first time someone told you about that magical place where bright minds from all over the world work together towards a common goal? Perhaps you saw a picture in a book, or had the chance to visit in person as a student? It is experiences like these that motivate many people to pursue a career in science, whether in particle physics or beyond.

In 2016 I had the pleasure of visiting CERN on a school trip. We toured the Synchrocyclotron and the SM18 magnet test facility. I was hooked. The tour guides talked with passion about the laboratory, the film presenting CERN’s first particle accelerator and the laboratory’s mission, and all those big magnets being tested in SM18. It was this experience that motivated me to study physics at university and to try to come back as soon as I could.

Accreditation

That chance arrived in September 2021 when I started a one-year technical studentship as editorial assistant on the Courier. From the first day I was eager to see as much as I could. During the final months of Long Shutdown 2, my supervisor and I visited the ATLAS cavern. The experience motivated me to ask one of my newly made friends, also a technical student who had recently become a tour guide, how to apply. The process was positive and efficient. After completing all the required courses from the learning hub and shadowing experienced guides, I became a certified ATLAS underground guide in November 2021 and gave my first tour soon after. I was nervous and struggled with the iris scanner when accessing the cavern, but all ended well, and further tours were scheduled. Then, in mid-December, all in-person tours were cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions. I needn’t have worried, as CERN was fully geared up to provide virtual visits. Among my first virtual audience members were students from the high school that brought me to CERN five years earlier and from my university, Nottingham Trent in the UK. 

The most satisfying thing is people’s enthusiasm and their desire to learn more about CERN and its mission

The virtual visits were quite challenging at first. It was harder to connect with the audience than during an in-person visit. But managing these difficulties helped me to improve my communication skills and to develop self-confidence. During this period, I conducted more than 10 virtual visits for different institutes, universities, family and friends, in both English and Spanish. 

At the beginning of March 2022, CERN moved into “level yellow” and in-person visits were resumed. Although only possible for a short period, I had the chance to guide visitors underground and had the honour of guiding the last in-person visit into the ATLAS cavern on 23 March before preparations for LHC Run 3 got under way. With the ATLAS cavern then off-limits, I signed up to present at as many CERN visit points as possible. At the time of writing, I am a guide for the Synchrocyclotron, the ATLAS Visitor Centre, Antimatter Factory, Data Centre, Low Energy Ion Ring and CERN Control Centre. 

Get involved

The CERN visits service always welcomes new guides and is working towards opening new visit points. Anyone working at CERN or registered as a user can take part by signing up for visit-point training on the tour-guide website: guides.web.cern.ch. General training for new guides is also available. All you need to show CERN to the public is passion and enthusiasm, and you can sign up for as many or as few as your day job allows. Diversity is encouraged and those who are multilingual are also highly valued.

Today, visits are handled by a dedicated section in the Education, Communications and Outreach group. The number of visitors has gradually increased over recent years, with 152,000 annual visitors before the pandemic started, excluding special events such as the CERN Open Days. The profile of visitors ranges from school pupils and university students to common-interest groups such as engineers and scientists, politicians and VIPs, and people with a wide range of interests and educational levels.

The benefits of becoming a CERN guide are immense. It gives you access to areas that would otherwise not be possible, the chance to experience important events in-person and to see your work at CERN, whatever it involves, from a fresh perspective. My personal highlight was watching test collisions at 13.6 TeV before the official start of Run 3 while showing Portuguese high-school students the ATLAS control room. The most satisfying thing is people’s enthusiasm and their desire to learn more about CERN and its mission. I particularly remember how a small child asked me a question about the matter–antimatter asymmetry of the universe, and how another young visitor ran from Entrance B at the end of a tour just to tell me how much she loved the visit.

The visits service makes it as easy as possible to get involved, and exciting times for guides lie ahead with the opening of the CERN Science Gateway next year, which will enable CERN to welcome even more visitors. If a technical student based at CERN for just one year can get involved, so can you!

The post Your guide to becoming a CERN guide appeared first on CERN Courier.

On 4 July 2012, Sean Carroll was at CERN to witness the momentous announcements by ATLAS and CMS – but not in his usual capacity as a physicist. He was there as an accredited member of the media, sharing an overflow room with journalists to get first-hand footage for the final chapter of his book. The Particle at the End of the Universe ended up being the first big title on the discovery and went on to win the 2013 Royal Society Science Books Prize. “It got reviewed everywhere, so I am really grateful to the Higgs boson and CERN!”

Carroll’s publisher sensed an opportunity for a timely, expert-authored title in 2011, as excitement in ATLAS and CMS grew. He initially said “No” – it wasn’t his research area, and he preferred to present a particular point of view, as he did in his first popular work From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. “With the Higgs boson, there is no disagreement, he says. “Everyone knows what the boson is, what it does and why is it important.” After some negotiation, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. It also delved into the LHC, the experiments and how it all works, with a dash of quantum field theory and particle physics more generally. “We were hoping the book would come out by the time they announced the discovery, but on the other hand at least I got to include the discovery in the book, and was there to see it.”

Show me the money

Books are not very lucrative, he says. “Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the success of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time awoke the interest of publishers, if you had a good idea for a physics book you could make a million dollars. But it is very hard to earn enough to make a living. “It takes roughly a year, or more depending on how much you have to learn, and depends on luck, the book and the person writing it.” His next project is a series of three books aimed at explaining physics to the general reader. The first, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time and Motion, due out in September, covers Newtonian mechanics and relativity; the second covers quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and the third complexity, emergence and large-scale phenomena. 

Meanwhile, Carroll’s podcast Mindscape, in which he invites experts from different fields to discuss a range of topics, has produced 200 episodes since it launched in 2018 and attracts around 100,000 listeners weekly. “I thought that it was a very fascinating idea, basically your personal radio show, but I quickly learned that I didn’t have that many things to say all by myself,” he explains. “Then I realised it would give me an excuse to talk to lot of interesting people and stretch my brain a lot, and that worked out really well.” 

Reaching out

As someone who fell in love with science at a young age and enjoyed speaking and writing, Carroll has clearly found his ideal career. But stepping outside the confines of research is not without its downsides. “Overall, I think it has been negative actually, as it’s hard for some scientists to think that somebody is both writing books and giving talks, and also doing research at the same time. There is a prejudice that if you are a really good researcher then that’s all you do, and anything else is a waste of time. But whatever it does to my career, it has been good in many ways, and I think for the field, because I have reached people who wouldn’t know about physics otherwise.”

We need to take seriously the responsibility to tell people what it is that we have learned about the universe, and why it’s exciting to explore further

Moreover, he says, scientists are obligated to communicate the results of their work. “When it comes to asking the public for lots of money you have to be able to explain why it’s needed, and if they understand some of the physics and they have been excited by other discoveries they are much more likely to appreciate that,” he says, citing the episode of the Superconducting Super Collider. “When we were trying to build the SSC, physicists were trying their best to explain why we needed it and it didn’t work. Big editorials in the New York Times clearly revealed that people did not understand the reasons why this was interesting, and furthermore thought that the kind of physics we do does not have any immediate or technological benefit. But they are all also curious like we are. And while we don’t all have to become pop-science writers or podcasters (just like I am not going to turn up on Tik Tok or do a demo in the street), as a field we really need to take seriously the responsibility to tell people what it is that we have learned about the universe, and why it’s exciting to explore further.”

The post You have to be able to explain ‘why’ appeared first on CERN Courier.

State-of-the-art particle accelerators and detectors cannot be bought off the shelf. They come to life in workshops staffed by teams of highly skilled engineers and technicians – such as heavy-machinist Florian Hofmann from Austria, who joined CERN in October 2019.

Florian is one of several hundred engineers and technicians employed by CERN to develop, build and test equipment, and keep it in good working order. He works in the machining and maintenance workshop of the mechanical and materials engineering (MME) group, which acts as a partner to many projects and experiments at CERN. “We tightly collaborate with all CERN colleagues and we offer our production facility and knowledge to meet their needs,” he explains. “Sometimes the engineers, the project leaders or even the scientists come to see how the parts of their work come together. It is a nice and humbling experience for me because I know they have been conceiving components for a very long time. Our doors are open and you don’t need special permission – everyone can come round!”

Before joining CERN, Florian began studying atmospheric physics at the University of Innsbruck. After two semesters, he realised that even though he liked science he preferred not to practise it, so decided to change to engineering and programming. After completing his studies and working in diverse fields such as automotive, tool making and water power plants, he joined CERN. Like many of his colleagues, his expertise and genuine curiosity for his work helps Florian to find tailor-made solutions for CERN’s challenging projects, every one of which is different, he explains. “Years ago the job used to be a traditional mechanics job, but today the cutting-edge technologies involved make this the Formula One of production.” 

Heavy metal 

Florian is currently working on aluminium joints for the vacuum tank of the kicker magnets for the Proton Synchrotron, a fundamental component on which the technicians collaborate with many other groups. The workshop is also contributing to numerous important projects such as the FRESCA2 cryostat, which is visible at the entry of the workshop, and the crab cavities for the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade. The radio-frequency quadrupole for Linac4, which now drives all proton production at CERN, was built here, as was the cryostat for the ICARUS neutrino detector now taking data at Fermilab and parts of the AMS-02 detector operating on the International Space Station. In the 1960s, the workshop was responsible for the construction of the Big European Bubble Chamber, now an exhibit in the CERN Microcosm.

Today, the cutting-edge technologies involved make this the Formula One of production

Before any heavy-machinery work begins, the machining team simulates the machining process to avoid failures or technical issues during fabrication. Although the software is highly reliable, Florian and his co-workers have to stand by to control and steer the machine, modifying commands when needed and ensuring that the activity is carried out as required. Every machine has one person in charge, the so-called technical referent, but the team receives basic training on multiple machines to allow them to jump onto a different one if necessary. The job stands out for its dynamism, Florian explains. “At the MME workshop, we perform many diverse manufacturing processes needed for accelerator technologies, not only milling and turning of the machine but also welding of exotic materials, among others. The possibilities are countless.”

Florian’s enthusiasm reflects the mindset of the MME workshop team, where everyone is aware of their contributions to the broader science goals of CERN. “This is a team sport. When you join a club you need it to have good management, and I think that here, because of our supervisors and our group responsibility, you are made to feel like everyone is pushing in the same direction.” Being curious, eager to learn and open-minded are important skills for CERN technicians, he adds.

“When you come to CERN you always leave with more than you can bring, because the experience of contributing to science, to bring nations together towards a better world, is really rewarding. I think everybody needs to ask themselves what they want and what kind of world they want to live in.”

The post It all starts in the workshop appeared first on CERN Courier.

Particle physicists are no strangers to outreach, be it giving public talks, writing popular books or taking part in science shows. But how many are brave enough to enter a career in teaching, arguably the most important science-communication activity of all? CERN alumni who have returned to the classroom reveal teaching to be one of the hardest but most rewarding things they have ever done. 

“I love my job,” exclaims Octavio Dominguez, who completed his PhD in 2013 studying the appearance of electron-cloud build-up in the LHC before deciding to switch to teaching. Having personally benefitted from some excellent teachers who sparked an “unquenchable curiosity”, he says, the idea of being a teacher had been on his mind ever since he was at secondary school. “The profession is definitely not exempt of challenges. Well, in fact I can say it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done… But if I keep doing it, it’s because the feedback from students is absolutely priceless. It’s truly amazing seeing my students evolve into the best version of themselves.”

Job satisfaction

Despite giving as many as 25 lessons per week, including presentations and practicals, and spending long hours outside school preparing materials and marking assignments, happiness and personal satisfaction are cited as the main rewards of working as a teacher. “I particularly enjoy seeing the enthusiasm in students’ eyes – it is something that cannot be explained with words,” says Eleni Ntomari, who was a summer student at CERN in 2006, then a PhD student and postdoc working on the CMS experiment. “From the outside, teaching might not appear difficult, but in reality it is not just a profession but a ‘project’ with no timetable and a continuation of trying to learn new things in order to become more efficient and helpful for your students.” Ntomari took advantage of every teaching opportunity that academic life offered, from being a lab instructor, becoming a CERN guide and giving talks at local schools when a teaching opportunity in Greece arose during her postdoctoral fellowship at DESY. “I realised teaching was highly gratifying, so I decided to continue my career as a physics teacher in secondary and high schools.”

I particularly enjoy seeing the enthusiasm in students’ eyes

Eleni Ntomari

Teachers of STEM subjects are in acute demand. In the US, physics has the most severe teacher shortage followed by mathematics and chemistry, with large surpluses of biology and earth-science teachers, according to the Cornell physics teacher education coalition. Furthermore, around two thirds of US high-school physics teachers do not have a degree in physics or physics education. The picture is similar in Europe, with a brief teacher survey carried out by the European Physical Society in 2020 revealing the overwhelming opinion that a serious problem exists: 81% of respondents believed there is a shortage of specialist teachers in their country, of which 87% thought that physics is being taught by non-specialists. 

Initiatives such as the UN International Day of Education on 24 January help to bring visibility and recognition to the profession, says Dominguez: “Education is one of the principal means to change the world for the better, but I feel that the teaching profession is frequently disregarded by many people in our society,” he says. “I’ve spent most of my career as a teacher in schools in deprived areas of the UK, and now I’m doing my second year in one of the most affluent schools in the country. This has given me a new perspective on society and has helped me understand better why some behaviour patterns appear.”

The CERN effect

The fascinating machines and thought-provoking concepts underpinning particle physics make a research background at CERN a major bonus in the classroom, explains Alexandra Galloni, a CERN summer student in 1995 who completed her PhD at the DELPHI experiment in 1998, spent a decade in IT consultancy, and is now head of science and technology at one of the UK’s top-performing secondary schools. “I milked my PhD as much as I could – I promised a visit from Brian Cox to my first school at interview, and although I didn’t pull that one off, contacts at CERN have enriched life both at school and on many of the CERN trips I inevitably ended up running. The Liverpool LHCb team have hosted incredible ‘Particle Schools’ at CERN for students and staff from many schools almost every year since then, leading to gushing feedback from all involved.”

I love the variety, the unexpected moments and the human interaction in the classroom

Alexandra Sheridan

Keeping in touch with events at CERN has also led to exciting moments for the students, she adds, such as watching the Higgs-discovery announcement in 2012, applying for Beamline for Schools in 2014, taking part in the ATLAS Open Data project and participating in Zoom calls with CERN contacts about future colliders and antimatter. “The surrounding tasks to teaching can be gruelling, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t resent the never-ending to-do list and lack of being able to plan much personal time during term-time. But I love the variety, the unexpected moments and the human interaction in the classroom.”

CERN offers many professional-development programmes for teachers to keep up-to-date with developments in particle physics and related areas, as well as dedicated experiment sessions at “S’Cool LAB”, the coordination of the highly popular Beamline for Schools competition and internships for high-school students. These efforts are also underpinned by an education-research programme that has seen five PhD theses produced during the past five years as well as 67 published articles since the programme began in 2009. “We are reaching out to all our member states and beyond to enthuse the next generations of STEM professionals and contribute to their science education,” says Sascha Schmeling, who leads the CERN teacher and student programmes. “Engaging the public with fundamental research is a vital part of CERN’s mission.” 

The post Have you got what it takes to teach? appeared first on CERN Courier.

On 15 November, around 260 physicists gathered at CERN (90 in person) to participate in the 2021 LHC Career Networking event, which is aimed at physicists, engineers and others who are considering leaving academia for a career in industry, non-governmental organisations and government. It was the fifth event in a series that was initially limited to attendance only by members of LHC experiments but which, in light of its strong resonance within the community, is now open to all.

Former members of the LHC experiments were invited to share their experiences of working in fields ranging from project management at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to consultants like McKinsey and pharmaceutical companies such as Boehringer Ingelheim. They spoke movingly of the difficulties of leaving academia and research, the introspection they experienced to discover the path that was right for them, and the sense of satisfaction and happiness they felt in their new roles.

Adjusting to new environments

Following a supportive welcome from Joachim Mnich, CERN director of research and computing, and Marianna Mazzilli, a member of the ALICE collaboration and chair of the organising committee, the first speaker to take to the stage in the main auditorium was Florian Kruse. Florian was a physicist on the LHCb experiment who, upon leaving CERN, decided to set up his own data-science and AI company called Point 8 – a throwback from many years spent commuting to the LHCb pit at LHC Point 8. His company has grown from three to 20 staff members, some ex-CERN, and continues to expand.

Setting the tone for the evening, he talked about what to expect when interacting with industry, how people view CERN physicists and where and how adjustments have to be made to adapt to a new environment – advising participants to “recalibrate your imposter syndrome” and “adjust to other audiences”.

Julia Hunt, a former CMS experimentalist, shared a personal insight into her journey out of academia, revealing that she fortuitously came across sailor Ellen MacArthur’s TED talk and soon landed the job of project manager at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The field of data science has welcomed numerous former CERN physicists, among them ex-ATLAS members Max Baak and Till Eifert, former CMS and ALICE member Torsten Dahms, ex-CMS member Iasonas Topsis-Giotis and ex-ALICE member Elena Bruna. Max gave a mini-course in bond trading at ING bank, while Iasonas put a positive spin on his long search for a job by saying that each interview or application taught him essential lessons for the next application, eventually landing him a job as a manager at professional services company Ernst & Young in Belgium. In a talk titled “19 years in physics… and then?”, Torsten shared the sleepless nights he endured when deliberating whether to continue in a field that had him relocate himself and his family five times in 15 years, ultimately turning down a tenure-track position in 2019.

Elena, who despite having a permanent position left the field in 2018 to become a data scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim, highlighted the differences between physics (where data structures are usually designed in advance and data are largely available) and data science (where the value of data is not always known a priori, and tends to be more messy), and indicated areas to highlight on a data-science CV. These include keeping it to a maximum of two pages and emphasising skills and tools, including big-data analysis, machine-learning techniques, Monte Carlo simulations and working in international teams. The topic of CVs came up repeatedly, a key message being that physicists must modify the language used in academic applications because people “outside” just don’t understand our terminology.

Two networking breaks, held in person and accompanied by beer, wine and pizza for those who were present and via Zoom breakout rooms for remote participants, were alive with questions and discussion.  Former ATLAS member Till Eifert was surrounded by physicists eager to learn more about his role as a specialist consultant with McKinsey in Geneva, speaking passionately about the renewable energy, cancer diagnostics and decarbonisation projects he has worked on. Head of CERN Alumni relations Rachel Bray and her team were on hand to answer a multitude of questions about the CERN Alumni programme.

70-85% of jobs come through networking

Anthony Nardini

Emphasising the power of such events, speaker Anthony Nardini from entrepreneurial company On Deck cited a 2017 Payscale survey which found that 70–85% of jobs come through networking. Following up from the event on Twitter, he offered takeaways for all career “pivoters”: craft and prioritise your guiding principles, such as industry, job function, company stage mission; create a daily information-gathering practice so that you are reading the same newsletters, articles and Twitter feeds as those in your target roles; identify and contact “pathblazers” in your target organisations who understand your background; and do the work to pitch how your unique skillset can help a startup to grow.

All the speakers gave their time and contact details for follow-up questions and advice. The overall message was that, while the transition out of academia can be hard, CERN’s brand recognition in certain fields helps enormously. Use your connections and have confidence!

The post Harnessing the LHC network appeared first on CERN Courier.

Describing itself as a big-data graph-analytics start-up, gluoNNet seeks to bring data analysis from CERN into “real-life” applications. Just two years old, the 12-strong firm based in Geneva and London has already aided clients with decision making by simplifying open-to-public datasets. With studies predicting that in three to four years almost 80% of data and analytics innovations may come from graph technologies, the physicist-based team aims to be the “R&D department” for medium-sized companies and help them evaluate massive volumes of data in a matter of minutes.

gluoNNet co-founder and president Daniel Dobos, an honorary researcher at the Lancaster University, first joined CERN in 2002, focusing on diamond and silicon detectors for the ATLAS experiment. A passion to share technology with a wider audience soon led him to collaborate with organisations and institutes outside the field. In 2016 he became head of foresight and futures for the United Nations-hosted Global Humanitarian Lab, which strives to bring up-to-date technology to countries across the world. Together with co-founder and fellow ATLAS collaborator Karolos Potamianos, an Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Oxford, the pair have been collaborating on non-physics projects since 2014. An example is the THE Port Association, which organises in-person and online events together with CERN IdeaSquare and other partners, including “humanitarian hackathons”.

CERN’s understanding of big data is different to other’s

Daniel Dobos

gluoNNet was a natural next step to bring data analysis from high-energy physics into broader applications. It began as a non-profit, with most work being non-commercial and helping non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Working with UNICEF, for example, gluoNNet tracked countries’ financial transactions on fighting child violence to see if governments were standing by their commitments. “Our analysis even made one country – which was already one of the top donors – double their contribution, after being embarrassed by how little was actually being spent,” says Dobos.

But Dobos was quick to realise that for gluoNNet to become sustainable it had to incorporate, which it did in 2020. “We wanted to take on jobs that were more impactful, however they were also more expensive.” A second base was then added in the UK, which enabled more ambitious projects to be taken on.

Tracking flights

One project arose from an encounter at CERN IdeaSquare. The former head of security of a major European airline had visited CERN and noticed the particle-tracking technology as well as the international and collaborative environment; he believed something similar was needed in the aviation industry. During the visit a lively discussion about the similarities between data in aviation and particle tracking emerged. This person later became a part of the Civil Aviation Administration of Kazakhstan, which gluoNNet now works with to create a holistic overview of global air traffic (see image above). “We were looking for regulatory, safety and ecological misbehaviour, and trying to find out why some airplanes are spending more time in the air than they were expected to,” says Kristiane Novotny, a theoretical physicist who wrote her PhD thesis at CERN and is now a lead data scientist at gluoNNet. “If we can find out why, we can help reduce flight times, and therefore reduce carbon-dioxide emissions due to shorter flights.” 

Using experience acquired at CERN in processing enormous amounts of data, gluoNNet’s data-mining and machine-learning algorithms benefit from the same attitude as that at CERN, explains Dobos. “CERN’s understanding of big data is different to other’s. For some companies, what doesn’t fit in an Excel sheet is considered ‘big data’, whereas at CERN this is miniscule.” Therefore, it is no accident that most in the team are CERN alumni. “We need people who have the CERN spirit,” he states. “If you tell people at CERN that we want to get to Mars by tomorrow, they will get on and think about how to get there, rather than shutting down the idea.”

Though it’s still early days for gluoNNet, the team is undertaking R&D to take things to the next level. Working with CERN openlab and the Middle East Technical University’s Application and Research Center for Space and Accelerator Technologies, for example, gluoNNet is exploring the application of quantum-computing algorithms (namely quantum-graph neural networks) for particle-track reconstruction, as well as industrial applications, such as the analysis of aviation data. Another R&D effort, which originated at the Pan European Quantum Internet Hackathon 2019, aims to make use of quantum key distribution to achieve a secure VPN (virtual private network) connection. 

One of gluoNNet’s main future projects is a platform that can provide an interconnected system for analysts and decision makers at companies. The platform would allow large amounts of data to be uploaded and presented clearly, with Dobos explaining, “Companies have meetings with data analysts back and forth for weeks on decisions; this could be a place that shortens these decisions to minutes. Large technology companies start to put these platforms in place, but they are out of reach for small and medium sized companies that can’t develop such frameworks internally.”

The vast amounts of data we have available today hold invaluable insights for governments, companies, NGOs and individuals, says Potamianos. “Most of the time only a fraction of the actual information is considered, missing out on relationships, dynamics and intricacies that data could reveal. With gluoNNet, we aim to help stakeholders that don’t have in-house expertise in advanced data processing and visualisation technologies to get insights from their data, making its complexity irrelevant to decision makers.”

The post Making complexity irrelevant appeared first on CERN Courier.

Entrepreneurial scientists and engineers take note: the next round of applications to Cyclotron Road’s two-year fellowship programme will open in the fourth quarter, offering a funded path for early-stage start-ups in “hard tech” (i.e. physical hardware rather than software) to fast-track development of their applied research innovations. Now in its sixth year, Cyclotron Road is a division of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, California) and is run in partnership with non-profit Activate, a specialist provider of entrepreneurship education and training. 

Successful applicants who navigate the rigorous merit-review process will receive $100,000 of research support for their project as well as a stipend, health insurance and access to Berkeley Lab’s world-class research facilities and scientific expertise. CERN Courier gets the elevator pitch from Rachel Slaybaugh, Cyclotron Road division director. 

Summarise your objectives for Cyclotron Road

Our mission is to empower science innovators to develop their ideas from concept to first product, positioning them for broad societal impact in the long term. We create the space for fellows to commercialise their ideas by giving them direct access to the world-leading scientists and facilities at Berkeley Lab. Crucially, we reinforce that support with a parallel curriculum of specialist entrepreneurship education from our programme partner Activate. 

What are the benefits of embedding the fellowship programme at Berkeley Lab?

Cyclotron Road is not a one-size-fits-all programme, so the benefits vary from fellow to fellow. Some of the fellows and their teams only loosely make use of Berkeley Lab services, while others will embed in a staff scientist’s lab and engage in close collaborative R&D work. The value proposition is that our fellows have access to Berkeley Lab and its resources but can choose what model works best for them. It seems to work: since 2015, Cyclotron Road fellows have collaborated with more than 70 Berkeley Lab scientists, while the organisations they’ve founded have collectively raised more than $360 million in follow-on funding. 

What do you look for in prospective Cyclotron Road fellows? 

We want smart, talented individuals with a passion to develop and grow their own early-stage hard-tech venture. Adaptability is key: Cyclotron Road fellows need to have the technical and intellectual capability to pivot their business plan if needed. As such, our fellows are collaborative team players by default, coachable and hungry to learn. They don’t need to take all the advice they’re given in the programme, but they do need to be open-minded and willing to listen to a range of viewpoints regarding technology innovation and commercial positioning. 

Explain the role of Activate in the professional development of fellows 

Activate is an essential partner in the Cyclotron Road mission. Its team handles the parallel programme of entrepreneurship education, including an onboarding bootcamp, weekly mentoring and quarterly “deep-dives” on all aspects of technology and business development. The goal is to turn today’s talented scientists and engineers into tomorrow’s technology CEOs and CTOs. Activate also has staff to curate strategic relationships for our fellows, helping start-ups connect with investors, industry partners and equipment suppliers. That’s reinforced by the opportunity to link up with the amazing companies in Cyclotron Road’s alumni network.

How does Cyclotron Road benefit Berkeley Lab?

There are several upsides. We’re bringing entrepreneurship and commercial thinking into the lab, helping Berkeley scientists build bridges with these new technology companies – and the innovators driving them. That has paybacks in terms of future funding proposals, giving our researchers a better understanding of how to position their research from an applications perspective. The knowledge transfer between Cyclotron Road fellows and Berkeley Lab scientists is very much a two-way process: while fellows progress their commercial ideas, they are often sparking new lines of enquiry among their collaborators here at Berkeley Lab. 

How are you broadening participation?

Fellows receive a yearly living stipend of $80,000 to $110,000, health insurance, a relocation stipend and a travel allowance – all of which means they’re able to focus full-time on their R&D. Our priority is to engage a diverse community of researchers – not just those individuals who already have a high net worth or access to a friends-and-family funding round. We’re building links with universities and labs outside the traditional technology hot-spots like Silicon Valley, Boston and Seattle, as well as engaging institutions that serve under-represented minorities. Worth adding that Cyclotron Road welcomes international applicants in a position to relocate to California for two years.  

Further information on the Cyclotron Road fellowship programme: https://cyclotronroad.lbl.gov/.

The post On your way to Cyclotron Road? appeared first on CERN Courier.

“Our job is to be part of the scientific community and show that there can be religious people and priests who are scientists,” says Gabriele Gionti, a Roman Catholic priest and theoretical physicist specialising in quantum gravity who is resident at the Vatican Observatory.

“Our mission is to do good science,” agrees Guy Consolmagno, a noted planetary scientist, Jesuit brother and the observatory’s director. “I like to say we are missionaries of science to the believers.”

Not only missionaries of faith, then, but also of science. And there are advantages.

“At the Vatican Observatory, we don’t have to write proposals, we don’t have to worry about tenure and we don’t have to have results in three years to get our money renewed,” says Consolmagno, who is directly appointed by the Pope. “It changes the nature of the research that is available to us.”

“Here I have had time to just study,” says Gionti, who explains that he was able to extend his research to string theory as a result of this extra freedom. “If you are a postdoc or under tenure, you don’t have this opportunity.”

“I remember telling a friend of mine that I don’t have to write grant proposals, and he said, ‘how do I get in on this?’” jokes Consolmagno, a native of Detroit. “I said that he needed to take a vow of celibacy. He replied, ‘it’s worth it!’.”

Cannonball moment

Clad in T-shirts, Gionti and Consolmagno don’t resemble the priests and monks seen in movies. They are connected to monastic tradition, but do not withdraw from the world. As well as being full-time physicists, both are members of the Society of Jesus – a religious order that traces its origin to 1521, when Saint Ignatius of Loyola was struck in the leg by a cannonball at the Battle of Pamplona. Today they help staff at an institution that was founded in 1891, though its origins arguably date back to attempts to fix the date for Easter in 1582.

“It was at the end of the 19th century that the myth began that the church was anti-science, and they would use Galileo as the excuse,” says Consolmagno, explaining that the Pope at the time, Pope Leo XIII, wanted to demonstrate that faith and science were fully compatible. “The first thing that the Vatican Observatory did was to take part in the Carte du Ciel programme,” he says, hinting at a secondary motivation. “Every national observatory was given a region of the sky. Italy was given one region and the Vatican was given another. So, de facto, the Vatican became seen as an independent nation state.”

The observatory quickly established itself as a respected scientific organisation. Though it is staffed by priests and brothers, there is an absolute rule that science comes first, says Consolmagno, and the stereotypical work of a priest or monk is actually a temptation to be resisted. “Day-to-day life as a scientist can be tedious, and it can be a long time until you see a reward, but pastoral life can be rewarding immediately,” he explains.

Consolmagno was a planetary scientist for 20 years before becoming a Jesuit. By contrast, Gionti, who hails from Capua in Italy, joined after his first postdoc at UC Irvine in California. Neither reports encountering professional prejudice as a result of their vocation. “I think that’s a generational thing,” says Consolmagno. “Scientists working in the 1970s and 1980s were more likely to be anti-religious, but nowadays it’s not the case. You are looked on as part of the multicultural nature of the field.”

And besides, antagonism between science and religion is largely based on a false dichotomy, says Consolmagno. “The God that many atheists don’t believe in is a God that we also don’t believe in.”

The observatory’s director pushes back hard on the idea that faith is incompatible with physics. “It doesn’t tell me what science to do. It doesn’t tell me what the questions and answers are going to be. It gives me faith that I can understand the universe using reason and logic.” 

Surprised by CERN

Due to light pollution in Castel Gandolfo, a new outpost of the Vatican Observatory was established in Tucson, Arizona, in 1980. A little later in the day, when the Sun was rising there, I spoke to Paul Gabor – an astrophysicist, Jesuit priest and deputy director for the Tucson observatory. Born in Košice, Slovakia, Gabor was a summer student at CERN in 1992, working on the development of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment, a project he later continued in Grenoble, thanks to winning a scholarship at the university. “We were making prototypes and models and software. We tested the actual physical models in a couple of test-beam runs – that was fun,” he recalls.

Gabor was surprised at how he found the laboratory. “It was an important part of my journey, because I was quite surprised that I found CERN to be full of extremely nice people. I was expecting everyone to be driven, ambitious, competitive and not necessarily collaborative, but people were very open,” he says. “It was a really good human experience for me.”

“When I finally caved in and joined the Jesuit order in 1995, I always thought, well, these scientists definitely are a group that I got to know and love, and I would like to, in one way or another, be a minister to them and be involved with them in some way.”

“Something that I came to realise, in a beginning, burgeoning kind of way at CERN, is the idea of science being a spiritual journey. It forms your personality and your soul in a way that any sustained effort does.”

Scientific athletes

“Experimental science can be a journey to wisdom,” says Gabor. “We are subject to constant frustration, failure and errors. We are confronted with our limitations. This is something that scientists have in common with athletes, for example. These long labours tend to make us grow as human beings. I think this point is quite important. In a way it explains my experience at CERN as a place full of nice, generous people.”

Surprisingly, however, despite being happy with life as a scientific religious and religious scientist, Gabor is not recruiting.

“There is a certain tendency to abandon science to join the priesthood or religious life,” he says. “This is not necessarily the best thing to do, so I urge a little bit of restraint. Religious zeal is a great thing, but if you are in the third year of a doctorate, don’t just pack up your bags and join a seminary. That is not a very prudent thing to do. That is to nobody’s benefit. This is a scenario that is all too common unfortunately.”

Consolmagno also offers words of caution. “50% of Jesuits leave the order,” he notes. “But this is a sign of success. You need to be where you belong.”

But Gionti, Consolmagno and Gabor all agree that, if properly discerned, the life of a scientific religious is a rewarding one in a community like the Vatican Observatory. They describe a close-knit group with a common purpose and little superficiality.

“Faith gives us the belief that the universe is good and worth studying,” says Consolmagno. “If you believe that the universe is good, then you are justified in spending your life studying things like quarks, even if it is not useful. Believing in God gives you a reason to study science for the sake of science.”

The post Quantum gravity in the Vatican appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN technologies and personnel make it a hub for so much more than exploring the fundamental laws of the universe. In an event organised by the CERN Alumni Relations team on 30 April, five CERN alumni who now work in the environmental industry discussed how their high-energy physics training helped them to get to where they are today.

One panellist, Zofia Rudjor, used to work on the ATLAS trigger system and the measurement of the Higgs-boson decays to tau leptons. Having spent 10 years at CERN, and with the discovery of the Higgs still fresh in the memory, she now works as a data scientist for the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). “For my current role, a lot of the skills that I acquired at CERN, from solving complex problems to working with real-time data streams, turned out to be very key and useful,” she said at the virtual April event. Similar sentiments were shared by fellow panelist Manel Sanmarti, a former cryogenic engineer who is now the co-founder of Bamboo Energy Platform: “CERN is kind of the backbone of my career – it’s really excellent. I would say it’s the ‘Champions League’ of technology!”

However, much learning and preparation is also required to transition from particle physics to the environment. Charlie Cook began his career as an engineer at CERN and is now the founder of Rightcharge, a company which helps electric car drivers reduce the cost of charging and to use cleaner energy sources. Before taking the plunge into the environmental industry, he first completed a course at Imperial College Business School on climate-change management and finance, which helped him “learn the lingo” in the finance world. A stint at Octopus Electric Vehicles was followed by driving a domestic vehicle-to-grid demonstration project called Powerloop which launched at the beginning of 2018. “Sometimes it’s too easy to start talking in abstract terms about sustainability, but, to really understand things I like to see the numbers behind everything,” he said.

Everything that is happening in the environmental field today is all because of policymakers

Mario Michan, CEO of Daphne Technology (a company focused on enabling industries to decarbonise), and a former investigator of antihydrogen at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, also stressed the importance of being familiar with how the sector works, pointing out the large role that policymakers take in the field: “Everything that is happening in the environmental field today is all because of policymakers,” he remarked.

Another particle physicist who made the change is Giorgio Cortiana, who now works at E.ON’s global advanced analytics and artificial intelligence leading several data-science projects. His scientific background in complex physics data analysis, statistics, machine learning and object-oriented programming is ideal for extracting meaningful insights from large datasets, and for coping with everyday problems that need quick and effective solutions, he explained, noting the different mentality from academia. “At CERN you have the luxury to really focus on your research, down to the tiny details — now, I have to be a bit more pragmatic,” he said. “Here [at E.ON] we are instead looking to try and make an impact as soon as we can.

Leaving the field
The decision to leave the familiar surroundings of high-energy physics requires perseverance, stressed Rudjor, stating that it is important to pick up the phone to find out what type of position is really being offered. Other panelists also noted that it is vital to spend some time to look at what skills you can bring for a specific posting. “I think there are many workplaces which don’t really know how to recruit people with our skills – they would like the people, but they typically don’t open positions because they don’t know exactly how to specify the job.”

The CERN Alumni Network’s “Moving Out of Academia” events provide a rich source of candid advice for those seeking to make the change, while also demonstrating the impact of high-energy physics in broader society. The latest environment-industry events follow others dedicated to careers in finance, industrial engineering, big data, entrepreneurship and medical technologies. More are in store, explains head of CERN Alumni Relations, Rachel Bray. “One of our goals is to support those in their early careers – if and when they decide to leave academia for another sector. In addition to the Moving out of Academia events, we have recently launched a new series which brings together early-career scientists and the companies seeking the talents and skills developed at CERN.”

The post From CERN to the environment appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN’s international relationships are central to its work, and a perfect example of nations coming together for the purpose of peaceful research, regardless of external politics. Through working in China during the 1980s and the Soviet Union/Russia in the early 1990s, physicist Paul Lecoq’s long career is testament to CERN’s influence and standing.

Originally interested in astrophysics, Lecoq completed a PhD in nuclear physics in Montreal in 1972. After finishing his military service, during which he taught nuclear physics at the French Navy School, he came across an advertisement for a fellowship position at CERN. It was the start of a 47-year-long journey with the organisation. “I thought, why not?” Lecoq recalls. “CERN was not my initial target, but I thought it would be a very good place to go. Also, I liked skiing and mountains.”

Royal treatment

During his third year as a fellow, a staff position opened for the upcoming European Hybrid Spectrometer (EHS), which would test CERN’s potential for collaboration beyond its core member states. “The idea was to make a complex multi-detector system, which would be a multi-institute collaboration, with each institute having the responsibility to build one detector,” says Lecoq. One of these institutes was based in Japan, allowing the exchange of personnel. Lecoq was one of the first to benefit from this agreement and, thanks to CERN’s already substantial image, he was very well-received. “At the time, people were travelling much less than now, and Japan was more isolated. I was welcomed by the president of the university and had a very nice reception almost every day.” It was an early sign of things to come for Lecoq.

During the lifetime of the EHS, a “supergroup” of CERN staff was formed whose main role was to support partners across the world while also building part of the experiment. By the time the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) came to fruition it was clear that it would also benefit from this successful approach. At that time, Sam Ting had been asked to propose an experiment for LEP by then Director-General Herwig Schopper, which would become the L3 experiment, and with the EHS coming to an end, says Lecoq, it was natural that the EHS supergroup was transferred to Ting. Through friends working in material science, Lecoq caught wind of the new scintillator crystal (BGO) that was being proposed for L3 – an idea that would see him link up with Ting and spend much of the next few years in China. 

BGO crystals had not yet been used in particle physics, and had only existed in a few small samples, but L3 needed more than 1 m³ of coverage. After sampling and testing the first crystal samples, Lecoq presented his findings at an L3 collaboration meeting. “At the end of the meeting, Ting pointed his finger in my direction and asked if I was free on Saturday. I responded, ‘yes sir’. Then he turned to his secretary and said, ‘book a flight ticket to Shanghai – this guy is coming with me!’”

This is something unique about CERN, where you can meet fantastic people that can completely change your life

Unknown to Lecoq upon his arrival in China, Ting had already prepared the possibility to develop the technology for the mass production of BGO crystals there, and wanted Lecoq to oversee this production. BGO was soon recognised as a crystal that could be produced in large quantities in a reliable and cost-effective way, and it has since been used in a generation of PET scanners. Lecoq was impressed by the authority Ting held in China. “The second day we were in China, we, well Ting, had been invited by the mayor of Shanghai for a dinner to discuss the opportunity for the experiment.” The mayor was Jiang Zemin, who only a few years later became China’s president. “I have been very lucky to have several opportunities like this in my career. This is something unique about CERN, where you can meet fantastic people that can completely change your life. It was also an interesting period when China was slowly opening up to the world – on my first trip everyone was in Mao suits, and in the next three to five years I could see a tremendous change that was so impressive.”

Lecoq’s journeyman career did not stop there. With LEP finishing towards the turn of the millennium and LHC preparations in full swing, his expertise was needed for the production of lead tungstate (PWO) crystals for CMS’s electromagnetic calorimeter. This time, however, Russia was the base of operations, and the 1.2 m³ of BGO crystal for L3 became more than 10 m³ of PWO for CMS. As with his spell in China, Lecoq was in Russia during a politically uncertain time, with his arrival shortly following the fall of the Berlin Wall. “There was no system anymore. But there was still very strong intellectual activity, with scientists at an incredible level, and there was still a lot of production infrastructure for military interest.”

It was interesting not only at the scientific level, but on a human level too

At the time, lithium niobate, a crystal very similar to PWO, was being exploited for radar communication and missile guidance, says Lecoq, and the country had a valuable (but unknown to the public) production-infrastructure in place. With the disarray at the end of the Cold War, the European Commission set up a system, along with Canada, Japan and the US, called the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC), whose role was to transfer the Soviet Union’s military industry into civil application. Lecoq was able to meet with ISTC and gain €7 million in funding to support PWO crystal production for CMS. Again, he stresses, this only happened due to the stature of CERN. “I could not have done that if I had been working only as a French scientist. CERN has the diplomatic contact with the European Commission and different governments, and that made it a lot easier.” Lecoq was responsible for choosing where the crystal production would take place. “These top-level scientists working in the military areas felt isolated, especially in a country that was in a period of collapse, so they were more than happy not only to have an opportunity to do their job under better conditions, but also to have the contacts. It was interesting not only at the scientific level, but on a human level too.”

Crystal clear

Back at CERN, Lecoq realised that introducing a new scintillating crystal, optimising its performance to the harsh operating conditions of the LHC, and developing mass-production technologies to produce large amounts of crystal in a reliable and cost-effective way, was a formidable challenge that could not be dealt with only by particle physicists. Therefore, in 1991, he decided to establish the Crystal Clear multidisciplinary collaboration, gathering experts in material science, crystal-growth, luminescence, solid-state physics and beyond. Here again, he says, the attractiveness of CERN as an internationally recognised research centre was a great help to convince institutes all over the world, some not connected to particle physics at all, to join the collaboration. Crystal Clear is still running today, and celebrating its 30th anniversary. 

Through developing international connections in unexpected places, Lecoq’s career has helped build sustained connections for CERN in some of the world’s largest and fruitfully scientific places. Now retired, he is a distinguished professor at the Polytechnic University in Valencia, where he has set up a public–private partnership laboratory for metamaterial-based scintillators and photodetectors, to aid a new generation of ionisation radiation detectors for medical imaging and other applications. Even now, he is able to flex the muscles of the CERN model by keeping in close contact with the organisation.

“My career at CERN has been extremely rich. I have changed so much in the countries I’ve worked with and the scientific aspect, too. It could only have been possible at CERN.”

The post Harnessing the CERN model appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN enjoys a world-class reputation as a scientific laboratory, with the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of the Higgs boson propelling the organisation into the public spotlight. Less tangible and understood by the public, however, is that to achieve this level of success in cutting-edge research, you need the infrastructure and tools to perform it. CERN is an incredible hub for engineering and technology – hosting a vast complex of accelerators, detectors, experiments and computing infrastructure. Thus, CERN needs to attract candidates from across a wide spectrum of engineering and technical disciplines to fulfil its objectives.

CERN employs around 2600 staff members who design, build, operate, maintain and support an infrastructure used by a much larger worldwide community of physicists. Of these, only 3% are research physicists. The core hiring needs are for engineers, technicians and support staff in a wide variety of domains: mechanical, electrical, engineering, vacuum, cryogenics, civil engineering, radiation protection, radio­frequency, computing, software, hardware, data acquisition, materials science, health and safety… the list goes on. Furthermore, there are also competences needed in human resources, legal matters, communications, knowledge transfer, finance, firefighters, medical professionals and other support functions.

On the radar

CERN’s hiring challenge takes on even greater meaning when one considers the drive to attract students, graduates and professionals from across CERN’s 32 Member and Associate Member States. In what is already a competitive market, attracting people from a large multitude of disciplines to an organisation whose reputation revolves around particle physics can be a challenge. So how is this challenge tackled? CERN now has a well-established “employer brand”, developed in 2010 to promote its opportunities in an increasingly digitalised environment. The brand centres around factors that make working at CERN the rich experience that it is, namely challenge, purpose, imagination, collaboration, integrity and quality of life – underpinned by the slogan “Take part”. This serves as an identity to devise attractive campaigns through web content, video, online, social media and job-portal advertisements to promote CERN as an employer of choice to the audiences we seek to reach: from students to professionals, apprenticeships to PhDs, across all diversity dimensions. The intention is to put CERN “on the radar” of people who wouldn’t normally identify CERN as a possibility in their chosen career path.

CERN doesn’t just bring together people from a large scope of fields but unites people from all over the world

As no single channel exists that will allow targeting of, for example, a mechanical technician in all CERN Member States, creative and innovative approaches have to be utilised. The varying landscapes, cultural preferences and languages come into play, and this is compounded by the different job-seeking behaviours of students, graduates and experienced professionals through a constantly evolving ecosystem of channels and solutions. A widespread presence is key. The cornerstones are: an attractive careers website; professional networks such as LinkedIn to promote CERN’s employment opportunities and proactively search for candidates; social media to increase visibility of hiring campaigns; and being present on various job portals, for example in the oil, gas and energy arenas. Outreach events, presence at university career fairs and online webinars further serve to present CERN and its diverse opportunities to the targeted audiences.

Storytelling is an essential ingredient in promoting our opportunities, as are the experiences of those already working at CERN. In the words of Håvard, an electromechanical technician from Norway: “I get to challenge myself in areas and with technology you don’t see any other place in the world.” Gunnar, a firefighter from Germany describes, “I am working as a firefighter in one of the most international fire brigades at CERN in what is a very complex, challenging and interesting environment.” Katarina, a computing engineer from Sweden, says, “The diversity of skills needed at CERN is so much larger than what most people know!” While Julia, a former mechanical engineering technical student from the UK put it simply: “I never knew that CERN recruited students for internships.” Natasha, a former software engineering fellow from Pakistan, summed it up with, “Here I am, living my dreams, being a part of an organisation that’s helping me grow every single day.” Each individual experience is a rich insight for potential candidates to identify with and recognise the possibility of joining CERN in their own right.

CERN doesn’t just bring together people from a large scope of fields but unites people from all over the world. Working as summer, technical or doctoral student, as a graduate or professional, builds skills and knowledge that are highly transferable in today’s demanding and competitive job market, along with lasting connections. As the cherry on the cake, a job at CERN paves the way to become CERN’s future alumni and join the ever-growing High-Energy Network. Take part!

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Mait Müntel came to CERN as a summer student in 2004 and quickly became hooked on particle physics, completing a PhD in the CMS collaboration in 2008 with a thesis devoted to signatures of double-charged Higgs bosons. Continuing in the field, he was one of the first to do shifts in the CMS control room when the LHC ramped up. It was then that he realised that the real LHC data looked nothing like the Monte Carlo simulations of his student days. Many things had to be rectified, but Mait admits he was none too fond of coding and didn’t have any formal training. “I thought I would simply ‘learn by doing’,” he says. “However, with hindsight, I should probably have been more systematic in my approach.” Little did he know that, within a few years, he would be running a company with around 40 staff developing advanced language-learning algorithms.

Memory models

Despite spending long periods in the Geneva region, Mait had not found the time to pick up French. Frustrated, he began to take an interest in the use of computers to help humans learn languages at an accelerated speed. “I wanted to analyse from a statistical point of view the language people were actually speaking, which, having spent several years learning both Russian and English, I was convinced was very different to what is found in academic books and courses,” he says. Over the course of one weekend, he wrote a software crawler that enabled him to download a collection of French subtitles from a film database. His next step was to study memory models to understand how one acquires new knowledge, calculating that, if a computer program could intelligently decide what would be optimal to learn in the next moment, it would be possible to learn a language in only 200 hours. He started building some software using ROOT (the object-oriented program and library developed by CERN for data analysis) and, within two weeks, was able to read a proper book in French. “I had included a huge book library in the software and as the computer knew my level of vocabulary, it could recommend books for me. This was immensely gratifying and pushed me to progress even further.” Two months later, he passed the national French language exam in Estonia.

Mait became convinced that he had to do something with his idea. So he went on holiday, and hired two software developers to develop his code so it would work on the web. Whilst on holiday, he happened to meet a friend of a friend, who helped him set up Lingvist as a company. Estonia, he says, has a fantastic start-up and software-development culture thanks to Skype, which was invented there. Later, Mait met the technical co-founder of Skype at a conference, who coincidentally had been working on software to accelerate human learning. He dropped his attempts and became Lingvist’s first investor.

Short-term memory capabilities can differ between five minutes and two seconds!

Mait Müntel

The pair secured a generous grant from the European Union Horizon 2020 programme and things were falling into place, though it wasn’t all easy says Mait: “You can use the analogy of sitting in a nice warm office at CERN, surrounded by beautiful mountains. In the office, you are safe and protected, but if you go outside and climb the mountains, you encounter rain and hail, it is an uphill struggle and very uncomfortable, but immensely satisfying when you reach the summit. Even if you work more than 100 hours per week.”

Lingvist currently has three million users, and Mait is convinced that the technology can be applied to all types of education. “What our data have demonstrated is that levels of learning in people are very different. Short-term memory capabilities can differ between five minutes and two seconds! Currently, based on our data, the older generation has much better memory characteristics. The benefit of our software is that it measures memory, and no matter one’s retention capabilities, the software will help improve retention rates.”

New talents

Faced with a future where artificial intelligence will make many jobs extinct, and many people will need to retrain, competitiveness will be derived from the speed at which people can learn, says Mait. He is now building Lingvist’s data-science research team to grow the company to its full potential, and is always on the lookout for new CERN talent. “Traditionally, physicists have excellent modelling, machine-learning and data-analysis skills, even though they might not be aware of it,” he says.

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The recent update of the European strategy for particle physics (ESPP) offered a unique opportunity for early-career researchers (ECRs) to shape the future of our field. Mandated by the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) to provide input to the ESPP process, a diverse group of about 180 ECRs were nominated to debate topics including the physics prospects at future colliders and the associated implications for their careers. A steering board comprising around 25 ECRs organised working groups devoted to topics including detector and accelerator physics, and key areas of high-energy physics research. Furthermore, working groups were dedicated to the environment and sustainability, and to human and social factors – aspects that have been overlooked in previous ESPP exercises. A debate took place in November 2019 and a survey was launched to obtain a quantitative understanding of the views raised.

The feedback from these activities was combined into a report reflecting the opinions of almost 120 signed authors. The survey suggests that more than half of the respondents are postdocs, around two-fifths PhD students and approximately a tenth staff members. Moreover, roughly one-third were female and two-thirds male. Several areas, such as which collider should follow the LHC and environmental and sustainability considerations, were highlighted by the participating ECRs. Among the many topics discussed, we highlight here a handful of aspects that we feel are key to the future of our field.

Building a sustainable future

A widespread concern is that the attractiveness of our field is at risk, and that dedicated actions need to be taken to safeguard its future. Certain areas of work are vital to the field, but are undervalued, resulting in shortages of key skills. Due to significant job insecurity many ECRs struggle to maintain a healthy work–life balance. Moreover, the lack of attractive career paths in science, compared to the flexible working hours and family-friendly policies offered by many companies these days, potentially compromises the ability of our field to attract and retain the brightest minds in the short- and long-term future. With the funding for the proposed Future Circular Collider (a key pillar of the ESPP recommendations) not yet clear, and despite it receiving the largest support among future-collider scenarios in CERN’s latest medium-term financial plan, an additional risk arises for ECRs to back the wrong horse.

The future of the field will depend on the success of reaching a diverse community

It is imperative to holistically include social and human factors when planning for a sustainable future of our field. Therefore, we strongly recommend that long-term project evaluations and strategy updates assess and include the impact of their implementation on the situation of young academics. Specifically, equal recognition and career paths for domains such as computing and detector development have to be established to maintain expertise in the field.

Next-generation colliders beyond the LHC will need to overcome major technical challenges in detector physics, software and computing to meet their ambitious physics goals. Our survey and debate showed that young researchers are concerned about a shortage of experts in these domains, where very few staff positions and even less professorships are open for particle physicists specialised in detector development and software and computing. In particular in the light of ever increasing project time scales, a sizable fraction of funding for non-permanent positions must be converted to funding for permanent positions in order to establish a sustainable ratio between fixed-term postdocs and staff scientists.

The possibility for a healthy work–life balance and the reconciliation of family and a scientific career is a must: currently, most of the ECRs consulted think that having children could damage their future and that moving between countries is generally a requirement to pursue a career in particle physics. These might constitute two reasons why only 20% of the polled ECRs have children. Put in a broader perspective, the future of the field will depend on the success of reaching a diverse community, with viable career paths for a wide spectrum of schemes of life. In order to reach this diverse community, it is not enough to simply offer more day-care places to parents. Similarly, the #BlackInTheIvory movement in 2020 shone a spotlight on the significant barriers faced by the Black community in academia – an issue also shared by many other minority groups. Discrimination in academia has to be counteracted systematically, including the filling of positions or grant-approval processes, where societal and diversity aspects must be taken into account with high priority.

The environmental sustainability of future projects is a clear concern for young researchers, and particle-physics institutes should use their prominent position in the public eye to set an example to other fields and society at large. The energy efficiency of equipment and the power consumption of future collider scenarios are considered only partially in the ESPP update, and we support the idea of preparing a more comprehensive analysis that includes the environmental impact of the construction as well as the disposal of large infrastructures. There should be further discussion of nuclear versus renewable energy usage and a concrete plan on how to achieve a higher renewable energy fraction. The ECRs were also of the view that much travel within our field is unnecessary, and that ways to reduce this should be brought to the fore. Since the survey was conducted, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, various conferences have already moved online, proving that progress can be made on this front.

Collider preference

In the context of the still-open questions in particle physics and potential challenges of future research programmes, the ECRs find dark matter, electroweak symmetry breaking and neutrino physics to be the three most important topics of our field. They also underline the importance of a European collider project soon after the completion of the HL-LHC. Postponing the choice of the next collider project at CERN to the 2030s, for example, would potentially negatively impact the future of the field: there could be fewer permanent jobs in detector physics, computing and software if preparations for future experiments cannot begin after the current upgrades. Additionally, it could be difficult to attract new, young bright minds into the field if there is a gap in data-taking after the LHC. While physics topics were already discussed in great detail during the broader ESPP process, many ECRs stated their discomfort about the way the next-generation scenarios were compared, especially by how the different states of maturity of the projects were not sufficiently taken into account.

About 90% of ECRs believe that the next collider should be an electron–positron machine

About 90% of ECRs believe that the next collider should be an electron–positron machine, concurring with the ESPP recommendations, although there is not a strong preference if this machine is linear or circular. While there was equal preference for CLIC and FCC-ee as the next-generation collider, a clear preference was expressed for the full FCC programme over the full CLIC programme. Given the diverse interest in future collider scenarios, and keeping in mind the unclear situation of the ILC, we strongly believe that a robust and diverse R&D programme on both accelerators and detectors must be a high priority for the future of our field.

In conclusion, both the debate and the report were widely viewed as a success, with extremely positive feedback from ECFA and the ECRs. Young researchers were able to share their views and concerns for the future of the field, while familiarising themselves with and influencing the outcome of the ESPP. ECFA has now established a permanent panel of ECRs, which is a major milestone to make such discussions among early-career researchers more regular and effective in the future.

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In December last year, a beam of protons was used to treat a patient with cardiac arrhythmia – an irregular beating of the heart that affects around 15 million people in Europe and North America alone. The successful procedure, performed at the National Center of Oncological Hadrontherapy (CNAO) in Italy, signalled a new application of proton therapy, which has been used to treat upwards of 170,000 cancer patients worldwide since the early 1990s.

In parallel to CNAO – which is based on accelerator technologies developed in conjunction with CERN via the TERA Foundation – a Geneva-based start-up called EBAMed (External Beam Ablation) founded by CERN alumnus Adriano Garonna aims to develop and commercialise image-guidance solutions for non-invasive treatments of heart arrhythmias. EBAMed’s technology is centred on an ultrasound imaging system that monitors a patient’s heart activity, interprets the motion in real time and sends a signal to the proton-therapy machine when the radiation should be sent. Once targeted, the proton beam ablates specific heart tissues to stop the local conduction of disrupted electrical signals.

Fast learner

“Our challenge was to find a solution using the precision of proton therapy on a fast and irregular moving target: the heart,” explains Garonna. “The device senses motion at a very fast rate, and we use machine learning to interpret the images in real time, which allows robust decision-making.” Unlike current treatments, which can be lengthy and costly, he adds, people can be treated as outpatients; the intervention is non-invasive and “completely pain-free”.

The recipient of several awards – including TOP 100 Swiss Startups 2019, Venture Business Plan 2018, MassChallenge 2018, Venture Kick 2018 and IMD 2017 Start-up Competition – EBAMed recently received a €2.4 million grant from the European Union to fund product development and the first human tests.

Garonna’s professional journey began when he was a summer student at CERN in 2007, working on user-interface software for a new optical position-monitoring system at LHC Point 5 (CMS). Following his graduation, Garonna returned to CERN as a PhD student with the TERA Foundation and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and then as a fellow working for the Marie Curie programme PARTNER, a training network for European radiotherapy. This led to a position as head of therapy accelerator commissioning at MedAustron in Austria – a facility for proton and ion therapy based, like CNAO, on TERA Foundation/CERN technology. After helping deliver the first patient treatments at MedAustron, Garonna returned to CERN and entered informal discussions with TERA founder Ugo Amaldi, who was one of Garonna’s PhD supervisors, about how to take the technology further. Along with former CERN engineer Giovanni Leo and arrhythmia expert Douglas Packer, the group founded EBAMed in 2018.

“Becoming an entrepreneur was not my initial purpose, but I was fascinated by the project and convinced that a start-up was the best vehicle to bring it to market,” says Garonna. Not having a business background, he benefitted from the CERN Knowledge Transfer entrepreneurship seminars as well as the support from the Geneva incubator Fongit and courses organised by Innosuisse, the Swiss innovation agency. Garonna also drew on previous experience gained while at CERN. “At CERN most of my projects involved exploring new areas. While I benefitted from the support of my supervisors, I had to drive projects on my own, seek the right solutions and build the appropriate ecosystem to obtain results. This certainly developed an initiative-driven, entrepreneurial streak in me.”

Healthy competition

Proton therapy is booming, with almost 100 facilities operating worldwide and more than 35 under construction. EBAMed’s equipment can be installed in any proton-therapy centre irrespective of its technology, says Garonna. “We already have prospective patients contacting us as they have heard of our device and wish to benefit from the treatment. As a company, we want to be the leaders in our field. We do have a US competitor, who has developed a planning system using conventional radiotherapy, and we are grateful that there is another player on the market as it helps pave the way to non-invasive treatments. Additionally, it is dangerous to be alone, as that could imply that there is no market in the first place.”

Leaving the security of a job to risk it all with a start-up is a gradual process, says Garonna. “It’s definitely challenging to jump into what seems like cold water… you have to think if it is worth the journey. If you believe in what you are doing, I think it will be worth it.”

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Since its launch in June 2017, the CERN Alumni Network has attracted more than 6300 members located in more than 100 countries. Predominantly a young network, with the majority of its members aged between 25 and 39, CERN alumni range between their early 20s up to those who are over 75. After a professional experience at CERN, be it as a user of the lab, as an associate, a student, a fellow or a staff member, our alumni venture into diverse careers in many different fields, such as computer software, information technology and services, mechanical or industrial engineering, electric/electronic manufacturing, financial services and management consulting.

The network was established to enable our alumni to maintain an institutional link with the organisation, as well as to demonstrate the positive impact of a professional CERN experience on society. Though most CERN alumni remain in high-energy physics research or closely related fields, those who wish to use their skills elsewhere, especially early-career members, will find active support in the Alumni Network.

The alumni.cern platform (also available as an app on Android and iOS) provides members with access to an exclusive and powerful network that can be leveraged as required, whether at the start of a career or later when the desire to give back to CERN is there. The platform facilitates different groups, including regional groups, interest groups (such as entrepreneurship and finance) and groups for managing the alumni of the CERN scientific collaborations. Events and selected news articles are also posted on the alumni.cern platform, and members can also benefit from messaging.

A key appeal of the platform is its jobs board, where both alumni and companies can post job opportunities free of charge. Since its launch more than 500 opportunities have been posted with 260 applications submitted directly via the platform, mostly in fields such as engineering, software engineering and data science. Several CERN alumni have found their next position thanks to the network, either directly via job postings or through networking events.

A notable success has been a series of “Moving out of Academia” networking events that showcase sectors into which CERN alumni migrate. Over the course of one afternoon, around half a dozen alumni are invited to share their experiences in a specific sector. Events devoted to finance, industrial engineering, big data, entrepreneurship and, most recently, medical technologies, have proved a great success. The alumni provide candid and pragmatic advice about working within a specific field, how to market oneself and discuss the additional skills that are advisable to enter a certain sector. These events attract more than 100 in-person participants and many more via webcast.

The Office for Alumni Relations has recently launched its first global CERN alumni survey to understand the community better and identify problems it can help to solve. The survey results will soon be shared with registered members, helping us to continue to build a vibrant and supportive network for the future.

Rachel Bray Office for CERN Alumni Relations.

Markus Pflitsch
Founder and CEO of Terra Quantum

Markus joined CERN as a summer student in 1996, working on the OPAL experiment at LEP. Eager to tackle other professional challenges, upon graduating he accepted an internship with the Boston Consulting Group. “On my first day I found myself surrounded by Harvard MBAs in sleek suits, wondering what we would have in common,” he says. “I think there are two very clear reasons why companies are so keen to employ people from CERN. Number one, you develop extremely strong and structured analytical skills, and this is coupled with the second reason: a CERN experience provides you with a deep passion to perform.” In 2001 Markus returned to Germany as director of corporate development with Deutsche Bank. He enjoyed a meteoric rise in the world of finance, moving to UniCredit/HypoVereinsbank as managing director in 2005, and then to Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW), first as head of corporate development and subsequently CEO of LBBW Immobilien GmbH. The global financial crisis in 2009 led him to pursue a more entrepreneurial role, and he moved into marketing, becoming CFO and managing director of Avantgarde. After six successful years he sought some major life changes, taking three months off and discovering a passion for hiking. In 2018 Markus founded Terra Quantum to develop quantum computing. He describes it as his proudest career achievement to date, taking him back to his lifelong interest in quantum physics. “CERN gave me so much!” he says. “Recently I brought 70 entrepreneurs to CERN and they were blown away by their visit. Not only were they impressed that CERN is seeking answers to the most profound and relevant questions, but the sheer scale of project management of such a gigantic endeavour left them in complete awe.”

Maria Carmen Morodo Testa
Launch range programmatic support officer at ESA

After completing her studies as a telecommunications engineer at the Polytechnic University in Barcelona, Carmen joined a multinational company in the agro-food sector specialising in automation and control systems, whilst studying for an MBA. On the university walls she spotted an advert for a staff position at CERN, which corresponded almost word for word to the position she held at the time, but in a completely different sector: CERN’s cooling and ventilation group. “So, why not?” she thought. “At CERN, I discovered the importance of being open to different paths and different ways of thinking.” In 2004, five years in to her position and with a “reasonable prospect” but no confirmation of a permanent contract, she began to think about the future. “I decided that it would be either CERN or a sister international organisation that would also give me the opportunity to take ownership of my work and shape it.” She sent a single application for an open position in the launcher department of the European Space Agency (ESA), and was successful. “I didn’t know of course if I was making a good choice and I was afraid of closing doors. But, my interest was already piqued by the launchers!” Carmen joined ESA at an exciting time, when Ariane 5 was preparing for flight. She trained on the job, largely thanks to a “work-meeting” technique that allows small teams to be fast and share knowledge and experience effectively on a specific objective, and is currently working on the Ariane 6 design project. “I do not hesitate to change positions at ESA, taking into account my technical interests, without giving too much importance to opportunities for hierarchical promotion.”

Alessandro Pasta
General manager at Diagramma

In 1987, then 18 year-old Alessandro was selected to take part in a physics school hosted by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. His mentor Eilam Gross sparked a passion for particle physics, and Alessandro arrived at CERN in 1991 as a summer student working on micro strip gas avalanche chambers for a detector to be installed in the DELPHI experiment at LEP. His contract was extended to enable him to complete his work, and he returned to CERN in 1992 to work on DELPHI. After three glorious years, his Swiss scholarship was replaced by an Italian one with a much lower salary. A desire to buy a house and start a family forced him to consider other avenues, drawing on his hobby of computer programming. “I had a number of ongoing consultancies with external companies so I switched my hobby for my job and physics became my hobby!” Alessandro returned to Italy in 1995 as a freelance software developer designing antennas. In 1999 he joined Milan software company Diagramma, and transitioned from telecommunications to car insurance – where he was tasked with developing tools to enable customers to enter their data online and obtain the best tariff. “Nowadays, this is quite commonplace, but at the time such software did not exist,” he says. Alessandro is now general manager of Diagramma, which is developing AI algorithms to increase the efficiency of its products. He values his particle-physics experience more than ever: “It wasn’t enough to know the physics and think logically, I also had to think differently, laterally one could say. I learnt how to solve problems using an innovative approach. Having worked at CERN, I know how multi-talented these people are and I am very keen to employ such talent in my company.”

Stephen Turner
Electrical/electronic engineer at STFC

Following a Master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Plymouth in the UK, Stephen started working for the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), where he sought a three-month placement as part of their graduate scheme. Having contacted an STFC scientist with CERN links “who knew someone, who also knew someone” at CERN – a scientist supporting the Beamline for Schools competition – Stephen secured his placement in the autumn of 2017. As a member of the support-scientists team, his role was to help characterise the detectors and prepare the experimental area for the students, enabling him to combine his passion for education and outreach with technical experience, where he would gain precious knowledge that could be put to use in his current role at the ISIS neutron and muon source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. “My experience at CERN provided me with the bigger picture of how such user facilities are run,” he says. Whilst at Plymouth, Stephen was also involved in Engineers Without Borders UK, which works with non-governmental organisations in developing countries on projects including water sanitation and hygiene, building techniques and clean energy. Although he now has a full time job, Stephen is still an active volunteer, and his interests in public engagement and international development brought him back to CERN in 2018 to share knowledge on target manufacturing and testing with the CERN mechanical and materials engineering group. “Lots of variety, public engagement and outreach were part of the job’s remit and it has kept its promises, he says. “There are not many companies that can offer this!”

John Murray
Private investor and synthetic-biology consultant

John arrived at CERN in 1985 as a PhD student on the L3 experiment at LEP. Every day was a new experience, he says. “My absolute favourite thing was spending time with the summer students, out on the patio of Restaurant 1 in the evenings, just chatting. Everyone was so curious and knowledgeable.” Despite the fulfilment of his experience, he decided to pursue a career in finance, reckoning it was a game he could “win”. He found his first job on Wall Street thanks to a book he had read about option pricing, realising that the equations were similar to those of quantum field theory, only easier. His employer, First Boston, soon gave him responsibility for investing the firm’s capital, and by the late 1990s he was a hedge-fund manager at Goldman Sachs. Realising that the investment world was about to go digital, he started his own company, building computer models that could predict market inefficiencies and designing trading strategies. “Finance textbooks said these sorts of things were impossible, but they were all written before the markets went digital,” he says. In recent years, John has turned his attention to synthetic biology, where he invests in and advises start-up companies. Biology is following a similar path to finance 30 years ago, he says, and the pace of progress is going to accelerate as the field becomes more quantitative. In 2018 John offered to co-found the New York group of the CERN Alumni Network. “I loved the time I spent at CERN and the energy of its people. In setting up the New York group, I want to recreate that atmosphere. I also hope to help young alumni at the beginning of their careers. I hope we can help our younger members avoid making the same mistakes we did!”

Anne Richards
CEO at a private finance services company

Anne came to CERN as a summer student in 1984 and fell in love with the international environment, leading her to apply for a fellowship where she worked on software and electronics for LEP. At the end of the fellowship, she was faced with a choice. “I was surrounded by these awesomely brilliant, completely focused physicists who were willing to dedicate their lives to fundamental research. And much as I loved to be amongst them and was proud of my equipment being installed in the accelerator, I didn’t feel I had the same passion they did. I was still seeking something else.” She returned to the UK and joined a technology consultancy firm in Cambridge where she had the opportunity to run a variety of different small-scale projects. “I really enjoyed that variety, I think that was what I was seeking,” she says. “Now I know that at CERN there are varied jobs one person can do, but at that time perhaps I wasn’t mature enough to realise that.” Today, she works in investment and finance, and has actively sought out roles that allow her to travel and work with people from different places. But a return visit to CERN in 2011 added another career dimension. “A fantastically positive change had happened in my lifetime: the appreciation of the importance of science by wider society. It was time to think how to capitalise on this and help society become more engaged directly with us.” The answer was the CERN & Society Foundation, of which Anne was appointed chair and that has seen CERN proactively engage with society, leading to the future Science Gateway project dedicated to education and outreach. “When we started the foundation in 2014 we did not know how incredibly successful it was going to be. The major part of this success comes from the interest and engagement we have had from alumni.”

Bartosz Niemczura
Software engineer, Facebook

Bartosz graduated with a Master’s degree in computer science from AGH University of Science and Technology in 2012. The following year he became a CERN technical student working on databases in CERN’s IT department. It was his first professional experience, and he was immediately captivated by the field of data security. Deciding to enter into a career in the area, he then applied for positions elsewhere, leading to a six-month research internship at IBM Zurich, participating in the Great Minds Programme. “My project focused on big-data analysis, an activity very closely related to my CERN project. I probably wouldn’t have been selected for the internship if I hadn’t had the CERN experience,” he explains. “It’s not just about the experience, but also the CERN reputation and prestige.” Working in a global environment with more than 20 international students was also extremely valuable. Since 2015 Bartosz has been working as a software engineer for Facebook’s product security team in Silicon Valley. “Despite the culture being slightly different at Facebook compared to CERN, I still apply the same approach I learnt at CERN,” he says. “Having learnt to communicate with people from other countries, this is highly useful for me in my current position as I now find it easier to make connections. It’s important not to close yourself off in your office. Go out and talk to people, those who have lots of experience, or who are working on something different from you, ask questions, make connections!”

Maaike Limper
Data engineering and web portal specialist at Swiss Global Services

Following a PhD on ATLAS, Maaike became a CERN openlab fellow in 2012. There was a lot to learn in moving from physics to IT, she says. “You need to understand how technology actually works: how it stores your data as bytes on the disk or how your computations can optimise the CPU usage.” Until last year, Maaike was head of aviation surface performance at Inmarsat, investigating solutions to allow aircraft passengers to have a reliable internet connection. One of her challenges was to put data from all the systems involved in passenger internet connectivity, such as ground control, satellites and aircraft together and understand where outages were experienced and why.” As a particle physicist, by contrast, Maaike was dealing with “very specific issues and no longer felt challenged”. She also didn’t warm to the ruthless competition she encountered, especially when the first LHC data were being collected and the normal collaborative spirit was slightly set aside. In her new career, which recently saw her join Swiss Global Services as a data-engineering specialist, she feels she is the expert. “I like the fact that I am constantly kept busy, challenged and, sometimes, very much stressed!” However, her particle-physics training had a useful impact on her career. “At CERN, we are very good at developing our own tools and we don’t just expect there to be a ready-made product on the market.” And Maaike is proud that the detector she worked on sits at the centre of the ATLAS experiment. “I was there, checking that each optical cable was producing the right sound once connected and that everything was working as expected. So actually, yes, a little piece of my heart is there, deep inside ATLAS.”

Panayotis Spentzouris
Head of Fermilab’s Quantum Science Program

Panayotis’s affiliation with CERN began in 1986 as an associate physicist working on a prototype of a detector for the DELPHI experiment at LEP. He moved to the US in 1990 and started a PhD, continuing his research at Fermilab, first as a Columbia University postdoc and then a junior staff scientist. Of his time at CERN he recalls the challenging experience of working for a multi-institutional, multicultural and multinational collaboration of many people of different cultures. “I remember it being a great experience with exposure to many wonderful things from machine shops to computers and scientific collaborations. It was also whilst at CERN that my first ever paper was published, when DELPHI started taking data, around 1990 I think – I was absolutely thrilled. Even though, somewhere in the middle of my career, I ended up doing a lot of computational physics, CERN is where I began my career as an experimentalist and I am always grateful for that.” He did not want to leave fundamental research, and today Panayotis is a senior scientist at Fermilab. In 2014 he was head of Fermilab’s scientific computing division and since 2018 has led Fermilab’s Quantum Science Program, which includes simulation of quantum field theories, teleportation experiments and applying qubit technologies to quantum sensors in high-energy physics experiments. Shortly afterwards, he presented the Fermilab programme to CERN openlab’s “Quantum computing for high-energy physics” event. “Coming back to CERN was actually strange, because everything had changed so much that I needed to follow signs to find my way to the cafeteria!” He would also like to see Fermilab establish an alumni network of its own. “It is good to have a sense of community, especially during difficult times when you need your community to stand up in support of your organisation.”

Cynthia Keppel
Professor, Hampton University

Having attended a small liberal arts college in the US where the focus was on philosophy, Thia found herself a bit frustrated. “We would discuss deep questions at length in class, and I would think:’ Can’t we test something?’ Physics seemed to be a place where people were striving to provide concrete answers to big questions, so I looked for summer internships in physics, and to my surprise I got one.” She wound up working with a group of plasma physicists who wanted an “artsy” person to make a movie visualising the solar magnetic flux cycle. “I liked learning the physics, I liked being sent off on my own, and it turned out I even liked the programming.” She went on to do a PhD in nuclear physics at SLAC and continued her research at JLab where, one night, while working late on a scintillating fibre-type particle detector, she realised that a colleague in the lab across from her was building the same type of detector – but for a project in medical instrumentation. They started to collaborate, and a few years later Thia founded the Center for Advanced Medical Instrumentation at Hampton University. More than a dozen patented technologies later, they were contacted by Hampton University’s president about proton therapy and realised that they had the know-how to build their own proton-therapy centre, which ended up being one of the largest in the world. “Having directed the centre from the start, Thia preferred the period of building, instrumenting and commissioning the facility over that of clinical operations. So she decided to set up a consulting company, which has so far helped to start 16 proton-therapy centres. “I think that my discourse-based philosophy education has been a help in learning to express ideas clearly and succinctly to people,” she says. “If you’re going to irradiate people, you must explain carefully and well why that’s a beneficial thing. Once you’re used to explaining things in plain language to potential patients or the public, you can give the same talk in a boardroom.”

•This final case study is based on an article in APS Careers 2020, produced in conjunction with Physics World. All other articles are drawn from the CERN Alumni Network.

The post Growing the high-energy network appeared first on CERN Courier.

A career as a surveyor offers the best of two worlds, thinks Dominique Missiaen, a senior member of CERN’s survey, mechatronics and measurements (SMM) group: “I wanted to be a surveyor because I felt I would like to be inside part of the time and outside the other, though being at CERN is the opposite because the field is in the tunnels!” After qualifying as a surveyor and spending time doing metrology for a cement plant in Burma and for the Sorbonne in Paris, Missiaen arrived at CERN as a stagier in 1986. He never left, starting in a staff position working on the alignment of the pre-injector for LEP, then of LEP itself, and then leading the internal metrology of the magnets for the LHC. From 2009–2018 he was in charge of the whole survey section, and since last year has a new role as a coordinator for special projects, such as the development of a train to remotely survey the magnets in the arcs of the LHC.

“Being a surveyor at CERN is completely different to other surveying jobs,” explains Missiaen. “We are asked to align components within a couple of tenths of a millimetre, whereas in the normal world they tend to work with an accuracy of 1–2  cm, so we have to develop new and special techniques.”

A history of precision

When building the Proton Synchrotron in the 1950s, engineers needed an instrument to align components to 50 microns in the horizontal plane. A device to measure such distances did not exist on the market, so the early CERN team invented the “distinvar” – an instrument to ensure the nominal tension of an invar wire while measuring the small length to be added to obtain the distance between two points. It was still used as recently as 10 years ago, says Missiaen. Another “stretched wire” technique developed for the ISR in the 1960s and still in use today replaces small-angle measurements by a short-distance measurement: instead of measuring the angle between two directions, AB and AC, using a theodolite, it measures the distance between the point B and the line AC. The AC line is realised by a nylon wire, while the distance is measured using a device invented at CERN called the “ecartometer”.

Invention and innovation haven’t stopped. The SMM group recently adapted a metrology technique called frequency sweeping interferometry for use in a cryogenic environment to align components inside the sealed cryostats of the future High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), which contract by up to 12 mm when cooled to operational temperatures. Another recent innovation, in collaboration with the Institute of Plasma Physics in Prague that came about while developing the challenging alignment system for HIE-ISOLDE, is a non-diffractive laser beam with a central axis that diverges by just a few mm over distances of several hundred metres and which can “reconstruct” itself after meeting an obstacle.

The specialised nature of surveying at CERN means the team has to spend a lot of time finding the right people and training newcomers. “It’s hard to measure at this level and to maintain the accuracy over long distances, so when we recruit we look for people who have a feeling for this level of precision,” says Missiaen, adding that a constant feed of students is important. “Every year I go back to my engineering school and give a talk about metrology, geodesy and topometry at CERN so that the students understand there is something special they can do in their career. Some are not interested at all, while others are very interested – I never find students in between!”

We see the physics results as a success that we share in too

CERN’s SMM group has more than 120 people, with around 35 staff members. Contractors push the numbers up further during periods such as the current long-shutdown two (LS2), during which the group is tasked with measuring all the components of the LHC in the radial and vertical direction. “It takes two years,” says Jean-Frederic Fuchs, who is section leader for accelerators, survey and geodesy. “During a technical stop, we are in charge of the 3D-position determination of the components in the tunnels and their alignment at the level of a few tenths of a millimetre. There is a huge number of various accelerator elements along the 63 km of beam lines at CERN.”

Fuchs did his master’s thesis at CERN in the domain of photogrammetry and then left to work in Portugal, where he was in charge of guiding a tunnel-boring machine for a railway project. He returned to CERN in the early 2000s as a fellow, followed by a position as a project associate working on the assembly and alignment of the CMS experiment. He then left to join EDF where he worked on metrology inside nuclear power plants, finally returning to CERN as a staff member in 2011 working on accelerator alignment. “I too sought a career in which I didn’t have to spend too much time in the office. I also liked the balance between measurements and calculations. Using theodolites and other equipment to get the data is just one aspect of a surveyor’s job – post-treatment of the data and planning for measurement campaigns is also a big part of what we do.”

With experience in both experiment and accelerator alignment, Fuchs knows all too well the importance of surveying at CERN. Some areas of the LHC tunnel are moving by about 1 mm per year due to underground movement inside the rock. The tunnel is rising at point 5 (where CMS is located) and falling between P7 and P8, near ATLAS, while the huge mass of the LHC experiments largely keeps them at the same vertical position, therefore requiring significant realignment of the LHC magnets. During LS2, the SMM group plans to lower the LHC at point 5 by 3 mm to better match the CMS interaction point by adjusting jacks that allow the LHC to be raised or lowered by around 20 mm in each direction. For newer installations, the movement can be much greater. For example, LINAC4 has moved up by 5 mm in the source area, leading to a slope that must be corrected. The new beam-dump tunnels in the LHC and the freshly excavated HL-LHC tunnels in points 1 and 5 are also moving slightly  compared to the main LHC tunnel. “Today we almost know all the places where it moves,” says Fuchs. “For sure, if you want to run the LHC for another 18 years there will be a lot of measurement and realignment work to be done.” His team also works closely with machine physicists to compare its measurements to those performed with the beams themselves.

It is clear that CERN’s accelerator infrastructure could not function at the level it does without the field and office work of surveyors. “We see the physics results as a success that we share in too,” says Missiaen. “When the LHC turned on you couldn’t know if a mistake had been made somewhere, so in seeing the beam go from one point to another, we take pride that we have made that possible.”

The post Surveying the surveyors appeared first on CERN Courier.

Alexandra Martín Sánchez began her studies in particle physics at the University of Salamanca, Spain, in 2003, during which she had an internship at the University of Paris-Sud at Orsay working in the LHCb collaboration. This prompted her to take a master’s degree in particle physics, followed by a PhD at Laboratoire de l’Accélérateur Linéaire (LAL) in Orsay. She worked on CP violation in B⁰ → DK*⁰ decays and hadronic trigger performance with the LHCb detector, and the subject fascinated her. She recalls with emotion witnessing the announcement of the Higgs-boson discovery in July 2012 from Melbourne, Australia, where the ICHEP conference was being held and where she was presenting her work: “Despite the distance, the atmosphere was super-charged with excitement.”

Getting a permanent position is particularly hard nowadays

Alexandra Martín Sánchez

Yet, one year later, Alexandra decided to leave the field. Why? “There were possibilities to do a postdoc in Marseille for LHCb, or elsewhere for other experiments, but I had already changed countries once and had created strong links in Paris,” she explains. “I loved working in research at CERN, and if it had been easier to continue in this way I would have, but getting a permanent position is particularly hard nowadays and you need to do several postdocs, often switching countries.”

After submitting her thesis, she consulted the careers office at Orsay to discuss her options. But it was word-of-mouth and friends who had already made the transition from research to industry that were the biggest help. After attending an IT careers fair in Paris in 2013, she was offered a job with French firm Bertin Technologies, who were looking for skills in scientific computing, in particular to offer consulting services for large groups including French energy giant EDF. Reckoning that this first step into industry could open the door to a large company, she took the plunge.

“Bertin Technologies had recruited me without having a clear idea regarding the profile of a particle-physics researcher, but they were immediately very satisfied with the way I worked. My recruiters were surprised to see me at ease in all aspects of the job, whether it was coding, functioning in teams or collaborating with other services.”

Moving on

After one year with the firm, Alexandra was recruited by EDF R&D, just as she had hoped for. Initially joining as a research engineer, five years later she is now project manager of open-source software called SALOME and leads a team of seven people. SALOME is used for industrial studies that need physical simulations, making it possible to model EDF’s operation of facilities and means of production, such as nuclear power plants or hydroelectric dams. “Computer science is the same as at CERN, even if it is applied to different data. Programming is also done in Python and C++. The code used is also that generated by researchers, that is to say, more or less ‘industrial’ and I easily found my way around, as we share the same development work habits. At CERN we work on software developed by CERN, and at EDF on software developed by EDF. In both cases it is also teamwork. The principles remain the same,” she explains.

“Large groups like EDF are of course fairly hierarchical companies, but CERN is also very large and very hierarchical. One can feel protected by such structures. On the other hand, they have a cumbersome administrative side, which means that things do not necessarily move as quickly as we would like. What I miss, however, is the international aspect of the collaborations. Today I’m thinking of staying at EDF because I’m happy there. The career paths are varied and the company motivates its engineers to change jobs every four or five years, unless they wish to become specialists in their fields.”

The thesis is a real professional experience!

Alexandra Martín Sánchez

The biggest lesson is that the skills she had learned during the process of obtaining a PhD in an environment like CERN are extremely transferable. “During my recruitment interviews, I highlighted my programming experience, my ability to communicate and present my work, and especially my ability to complete a thesis project over several years,” she says. “My advice to alumni looking for a job is to make the most of this PhD experience. Both sides of the job are of interest to recruiters: the technical part but also the communication and collaboration skills with researchers and engineers from all over the world. This makes a real difference from candidates coming from an engineering school: the thesis is a real professional experience!”

The post Opening doors with a particle-physics PhD appeared first on CERN Courier.

In 2018, Eleni Mountricha’s career in particle physics was taking off. Having completed a master’s thesis at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), a PhD jointly with NTUA and Université Paris-Sud, and a postdoc with Brookhaven National Laboratory, she had just secured a fellowship at CERN and was about to select a research topic. A few weeks later, she ditched physics for a career in industry. Having been based at CERN for more than a decade, and as a member of the ATLAS team working on the Higgs boson at the time of its discovery in 2012, leaving academia was one of the toughest decisions she has faced.

“On the one hand I was looking for a more permanent position, which looked quite hard to achieve in research, and on the other, in the years after the Higgs-boson discovery, my excitement and expectation about more new physics had started to fade,” she says. “There was always the hope of staying in academia, conducting research and exploring new fields of physics. But when the idea of possibly leaving kicked in, I decided that I should explore the potential of all alternatives.”

Mountricha had just completed initial discussions about her CERN research project when she received an offer of a permanent contract at Inmarsat – a provider of mobile satellite communications based in the nearby Swiss town of Nyon. It was unexpected, given how few positions she had applied for. “I felt a mixture of happiness and satisfaction at having succeeded in something that I didn’t expect I had many chances for, and frustration at the prospect of leaving something that I had spent many years on with a lot of dedication,” she explains. “What made it even harder was the discussions with other CERN experiments during the first month of the fellowship, which sparked my physics excitement again.”

New pastures

Mountricha’s idea to leave physics first formed after attending, out of curiosity, a career networking event for LHC-experiment physicists in November 2017. “The main benefit I got out of the event was a feeling that, even if I left, this would not be the end of the world; and that, if I searched enough, I could always find exciting things to do.” The networking event now takes place annually.

The Inmarsat job was brought to Mountricha’s attention by a fellow CERN alumnus and it was the only job that she had applied for outside physics. “I believe that I was lucky but I also had invested a lot of personal time to polish my skills, prepare for the interview and, in the end, it all came together,” she says.

People should not feel disappointed for having to move outside physics

Today, Mountricha’s official job title is “aero-service performance manager”. She works in the data-science team of the company’s aviation department collecting and reporting on data about aircraft connectivity and usage. This involves the use of Python to develop custom applications, analysing data using Python and SQL, and developing reporting and monitoring tools such as web applications. Her daily tasks vary from data analysis to developing new products. “Much of the work that I do, I had no clue about in the past and I had to learn. Some other pieces of work, like the data analytics, I used to do in a research context. However, the level at which I was doing it at CERN was much more sophisticated and complex. Many people in my team are physicists, all of them from CERN. Besides the technical aspects though, it is really at CERN that I learned how to collaborate, discuss with people, bring and collect ideas, solve problems, present arguments, and all those soft skills that are very important in my current job.”

As for advice to others who are considering taking the leap, Mountricha thinks that people should not feel disappointed for having to move outside physics. “Fundamental research is a lot of fun and does equip us with much sought-after skills and experience. On the other hand, there are many exciting projects out there, where we can apply everything that we have learned and develop much further.”

Higgs nostalgia

While happy to be on a new career path at the age of 37, working on the search for the Higgs boson will take some beating. “The announcement of the discovery was made in July, the papers were published in August and I defended my PhD thesis in September, so there was much pressure to finalise my work for all of those deadlines,” recalls Mountricha. “Even the times when I was sleeping on top of my PC, exhausted, I still remember them with love and nostalgia. In particular, I remember the day of the announcement of the discovery, there were people sleeping outside the main auditorium the night before in order to make it to the presentation. As a result, I ended up watching it remotely from building 40 together with the whole analysis team. I was slightly disappointed not to be physically present in the packed auditorium, but this nevertheless remains such an important moment of my life.”

The post Flying high after the Higgs appeared first on CERN Courier.

The Courier met with Yen and Bart Butler, ProtonMail’s chief technology officer and fellow CERN alumnus, at the company’s Geneva headquarters to find out how a discussion in CERN’s Restaurant 1 was transformed into a company with more than 100 employees serving more than 10 million users.

If you are a Gmail user, then you are not Google’s customer, you are the product that Google sells to its real customer, which is advertisers

“The business model of the internet today really isn’t compatible with privacy,” explains Yen. “It’s all about the relationship between the provider and customer. If you are a Gmail user, then you are not Google’s customer, you are the product that Google sells to its real customer, which is advertisers. With ProtonMail, the people who are paying us are also our users. If we were ever to betray the trust of the user base, which is paying us precisely for reasons of privacy, then the whole business model collapses.”

Anyone can sign up for a ProtonMail account. Doing so generates a pair of public and private keys based on secure RSA-type encryption implementations and open-source cryptographic libraries. User data is encrypted using a key that ProtonMail does not have access to, which means the company cannot decrypt or access a user’s messages (nor offer data recovery if a password is forgotten). The challenge, says Yen, was not so much in developing the underlying algorithms, but in applying this level of security to an e-mail service in a user-friendly way.

In 2014 Yen and ProtonMail’s other co-founders, Jason Stockman and Wei Sun, entered a competition at MIT to pitch the idea. They lost, but reasoned that they had already built the thing and got a couple of hundred CERN people using it, so why not open it up to the world and see what happens? Within three days of launching the website 10,000 people had signed up. It was surprising and exciting, says Yen, but also scary. “E-mail has to work. A bank or something might close down their websites for an hour of maintenance once in a while, but you can’t do that with e-mail,” he says.

ProtonMail’s CERN origins (the name came from the fact that its founders were working on the Large Hadron Collider) meant that the technology could first come under the scrutiny of technically minded people – “early adopters”, who play a vital role in the life cycle of new products. But what might be acceptable to tech-minded people is not necessarily what the broader users want, says Yen. He quickly realised that the company had to grow, and that he had been forced into a “tough and high-risk” decision between ProtonMail and his academic career. Eventually deciding to take the leap, Harvard granted him a period of absence, and Yen set about dealing with the tens of thousands of users who were waiting to get onto the service.

In need of cash, the fledgling software outfit decided to try something unusual: crowd funding. This approach broke new ground in Switzerland, and ProtonMail soon became a test case in tax law as to whether such payments should be considered revenue or donation (the authorities eventually ruled on the former). But the effort was a huge success, raising 0.5 million Swiss Francs in a little over two months. “Venture capital (VC) was a mystery to us,” says Yen. “We didn’t know anybody, we didn’t have a business plan, we were just a few people writing code. But, funnily enough, the crowd sourcing, in addition to the money itself, got a lot of attention and this attracted interest from VCs.” A few months later, ProtonMail had received 2 million Swiss Francs in seed funding.

“It is one thing to have an idea – then we had to actually do what we’d promised: build a team, hire people, scale up the product and have some sort of company to run things, with corporate identity, accounting, tax compliance, etc. There wasn’t really a marketing plan… it was more of a technical challenge to build the service,” says Yen. “If I was to give advice to someone in my position five years ago, then there isn’t a lot I could say. Starting a company is something new for almost everybody who does it, and I don’t think physicists are at a disadvantage compared to someone who went to business school. All you have to do is work hard, keep learning and you have to have the right people around you.”

It’s not a traditional company – 10–15% of the staff today is CERN scientists

It was around that time, in 2015, when Butler, also a former ATLAS experimentalist working on supersymmetry and one-time supervisor of Yen, joined ProtonMail. “A lot of that year was based around evolving the product, he says. “There was a big difference between what the product originally was versus what it needed to be to scale up. It’s not a traditional company – 10–15% of the staff today is CERN scientists. A lot of former physicists have developed into really good software engineers, but we’ve had to bring in properly trained software engineers to add the rigour that we need. At the end of the day, it’s easier to teach a string theorist how to code than it is to teach advanced mathematics and complex cryptographic concepts to someone who codes.”

With the company, Proton Technologies, by then well established – and Yen having found time to hotfoot it back to Harvard for one “very painful and ridiculous” month to write up his PhD thesis – the next milestone came in 2016 when ProtonMail was actually launched. It was time to begin charging for accounts, and to provide those who already had signed up with premium paid-for services. It was the ultimate test of the business model: would enough people be prepared to pay for secure e-mail to make ProtonMail a viable and even profitable business? The answer turned out to be “yes”, says Yen. “2016 was make or break because eventually the funding was going to run out. We discussed whether we should raise money to buy us more time. But we decided just to work our asses off instead. We came very close but we started generating revenue just as the VC cash ran out.”

Since then, ProtonMail has continued to scale up its services, for instance introducing mobile apps, and its user base has grown to more than 10 million. “Our main competitors are the big players, Google and Microsoft,” says Yen. “If you look at what Google offers today, it’s actually really nice to use. So the longer vision is: can we offer what Google provides — services that are secure, private and beneficial to society? There is a lot to build there, ProtonDrive, ProtonCalendar, for example, and we are working to put together that whole ecosystem.”

A big part of the battle ahead is getting people to understand what is happening with the internet and their data, says Butler. “Nobody is saying that when Google or Facebook began they went out to grab people’s data. It’s just the way the internet evolved: people like free things. But the pitfalls of this model are becoming more and more apparent. If you talk to consumers, there is no choice in the market. It was just e-mail that sold your data. So we want to provide that private option online. I think this choice is really important for the world and it’s why we do what we do.”

The post From SUSY to the boardroom appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN has 65 years of history and more than 13,000 international users. The CERN Alumni Network, launched in June 2017 as a strategic objective of the CERN management, now has around 4600 members spanning all parts of the world. Alumni pursue careers across many fields, including industry, economics, information technology, medicine and finance. Several have gone on to launch successful start-ups, some of them directly applying CERN-inspired technologies.

So far, around 350 job opportunities, posted by alumni or companies aware of the skills and profiles developed at CERN, have been published on the  alumni.cern platform. Approximately 25% of the jobs posted are for software developer/engineer positions, 16% for data science and 15% for IT engineering positions. Several members have already been successful in finding employment through the network.

Another objective of the alumni programme is to help early-career physicists make the transition from academia to industry if they choose to do so. Three highly successful “Moving out of academia” events have been held at CERN with the themes finance, big data and industrial engineering. Each involved inviting a panel of alumni working in a specific field to give candid and pragmatic advice, and was very well attended by soon-to-be CERN alumni, with more than 100 people at each event. In January the alumni network took part in an academia/industry event titled “Beyond the Lab – Astronomy and Particle Physics in Business” at the newly inaugurated Higgs Innovation Centre at the University of Edinburgh.

The data challenge

The network is still in its early days but has the potential to expand much further. Improving the number of alumni who have provided data (currently 37%) is an important aim for the coming years. Knowing where our alumni are located and their current professional activity allows us to reach out to them with relevant information, proposals or requests. Recently, to help demonstrate the impact of experience gained at CERN, we launched a campaign to invite those who have already signed up to update their profiles concerning their professional and educational experience. Increasing alumni interactions, engagement and empowerment is one of the most challenging objectives at this stage, as we are competing with many other communities and with mobile apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp and LinkedIn.

One very effective means for empowering local alumni communities are regional groups. At their own initiative, members have created seven of them (in Texas, New York, London, Eindhoven, Swiss Romandie, Boston and Athens) and two more are in the pipeline (Vienna and Zurich). Their main activities are to hold events ranging from a simple drink to getting to know each other at more formal events, for example as speakers in STEM-related fields.

One of the most rewarding aspects of running the network has been getting to know alumni and hearing their varied stories. “It’s great that CERN values the network of physicists past and present who’ve passed through or been based at the lab. The network has already led to some very useful contacts for me,” writes former summer student Matin Durrani, now editor of Physics World magazine. “Best wishes from Guyancourt (first office) as well as from Valenciennes (second office) and of course Stręgoborzyce (my family home). Let’s grow and grow and show where we are after our experience with CERN,” writes former technical student Wojciech Jasonek, now a mechanical engineering consultant.

After two years of existence we can say that the network is firmly taking root and that the CERN Office of Alumni Relations has seen engagement and interactions between alumni growing. Anyone who has been (or still is) a user, associate, fellow, staff or student at CERN, is eligible to join the network via alumni.cern.

The post High-energy networking appeared first on CERN Courier.

In the world of communication, everyone has a role to play. During the past two decades, the ability of researchers to communicate their work to funding agencies, policymakers, entrepreneurs and the public at large has become an increasingly important part of their job. Scientists play a fundamental role in society, generally enjoying an authoritative status, and this makes us accountable.

Science communication is not just a way to share knowledge, it is also about educating new generations in the scientific approach and attracting young people to scientific careers. In addition, fundamental research drives the development of technology and innovation, playing an important role in providing solutions in challenging areas such as health care, the provision of food and safety. This obliges researchers to disseminate the results of their work.

Evolving attitudes

Although science communication is becoming increasingly unavoidable, the skills it requires are not yet universal and some scientists are not prepared to do it. Of course there are risks involved. Communication can distract individuals from research and objectives, or, if done badly, can undermine the very messages that the scientist needs to convey. The European Researchers’ Night is a highly successful annual event that was initiated in 2005 as a European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, and offers an opportunity for scientists to get more involved in science communication. It falls every final Friday of September, and illustrates how quickly attitudes are evolving.

In 2006, with a small group of researchers from the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) located close to Frascati, we took part in one of the first Researchers’ Night events. Frascati is surrounded by important scientific institutions and universities, and from the start the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, the European Space Agency and the National Institute for Astrophysics joined the collaboration with INFN, along with the Municipality of Frascati and the Cultural and Research Department of the Lazio region, which co-funded the initiative.

Since then, thousands of researchers, citizens, public and private institutions have worked together to change the public perception of science and of the infrastructure in the Frascati and Lazio regions, supported by the programme. Today, after 13 editions, it involves more than 60 scientific partners spread from the north to the south of Italy in 30 cities, and attracts more than 50,000 attendees, with significant media impact (figure 1). Moreover, it has now evolved to become a week-long event, is linked to many related events throughout the year, and has triggered many institutions to develop their own science-communication projects.

Analysing the successive Frascati Researchers’ Night projects allows a better understanding of the evolution of science-communication methodology. Back in 2006, scientists started to open their laboratories and research infrastructures to present their jobs in the most comprehensible way, with a view to increasing the scientific literacy of the public and to fill their “deficit” of knowledge. They then tried to create a direct dialogue by meeting people in public spaces such as squares and bars, discussing the more practical aspects of science, such as how public money is spent, and how much researchers are responsible for their work. Those were the years in which the socio-economic crisis started to unfold. It was also the beginning of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, when economic growth and terms such as “innovation” started to substitute scientific progress and discovery. It was therefore becoming more important than ever to engage with the public and keep the science flag flying.

In recent years, this approach has changed. Two biannual projects that are also part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action – Made in Science and BEES (BE a citizEn Scientist) underline a different vision of science and of the methodology of communication. Made in Science (which was live between 2016 and 2017) was supposed to represent the “trademark” of research, aiming to communicate to society the importance of the science production chain in terms of quality, identity, creativity, know-how and responsibility. In this chain, which starts from fundamental research and ends with social benefits, no one is excluded and must take part in the decision process and, where possible, in the research itself. Its successor, BEES (2018–2019), on the other hand, aims to bring citizens up close to the discovery process, showing how long it takes and how it can be tough and frustrating. Both projects follow the most recent trends in science communication based on a participative or “public engagement” model, rather than the traditional “deficit” model. Here, researchers are not the main actors but facilitators of the learning process with a specific role: the expert one.

Nerd or not a nerd?

Nevertheless, this evolution of science communication isn’t all positive. There are many examples of problems in science communication: the explosion of concerns about science (vaccines, autism, GMO, homeopathy, etc); the avoidance of science and technology in preference to returning to a more “natural” life; the exploitation of science results (positive or negative) to support conspiracy theories or influence democracies; and overplaying the benefits for knowledge and technology transfer, to list a few examples. Last but not least, some strong bias still remains among both scientists and audiences, limiting the effectiveness of communication.

The first, and probably the hardest, is the stereotype bias: are you a “nerd”, or do you feel like a nerd? Often scientists refer to themselves as a category that can’t be understood by society, consequently limiting their capacity to interact with the public. On the other hand, scientists are sometimes real nerds, and seen by the public as nerds. This is true for all job categories, but in the case of scientists this strongly conditions their ability to communicate.

Age, gender and technological bias also still play a fundamental role, especially in the most developed European countries. Young people may understand science and technology more easily, while women still do not seem to have full access to scientific careers and to the exploitation of technology. Although the transition from a deficit to a participative model is already common in education and democratic societies, it is not yet completed in science, which is likely because of the strong bias that still seems to exist among researchers and audiences. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Researchers’ Night is a powerful way in which scientists can address such issues.

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Since the advent of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN has been recognised as the world’s leading laboratory for experimental particle physics. More than 10,000 people work at CERN on a daily basis. The majority are members of universities and other institutions worldwide, and many are young students and postdocs. The experience of working at CERN therefore plays an important role in their careers, be it in high-energy physics or a different domain.

The value of education

In 2016 the CERN management appointed a study group to collect information about the careers of students who have completed their thesis studies in one of the four LHC experiments. Similar studies were carried out in the past, also including people working on the former LEP experiments, and were mainly based on questionnaires sent to the team leaders of the various collaborator institutes. The latest study collected a larger and more complete sample of up-to-date information from all the experiments, with the aim of addressing young physicists who have left the field. This allows a quantitative measurement of the value of the education and skills acquired at CERN in finding jobs in other domains, which is of prime importance to evaluate the impact and role of CERN’s culture.

Following an initial online questionnaire with 282 respondents, the results were presented to the CERN Council in December 2016. The experience demonstrated the potential for collecting information from a wider population and also to deepen and customise the questions. Consequently, it was decided to enlarge the study to all persons who have been or are still involved with CERN, without any particular restrictions. Two distinct communities were polled with separate questionnaires: past and current CERN users (mainly experimentalists at any stage of their career), and theorists who had collaborated with the CERN theory department. The questionnaires were opened for a period of about four months and attracted 2692 and 167 participants from the experimental and theoretical communities, respectively. A total of 84 nationalities were represented, with German, Italian and US nationals making
up around half, and the distribution of participants by experiments was: ATLAS (994); CMS (977); LHCb (268) ALICE (102); and “other” (87), which mainly included members of the NA62 collaboration.

The questionnaires addressed various professional and sociological aspects: age, nationality, education, domicile and working place, time spent at CERN, acquired expertise, current position, and satisfaction with the CERN environment. Additional points were specific to those who are no longer CERN users, in relation to their current situation and type of activity. The analysis revealed some interesting trends.

For experimentalists, the CERN environment and working experience is considered as satisfactory or very satisfactory by 82% of participants, which is evenly distributed across nationalities. In 70% of cases, people who left high-energy physics mainly did so because of the long and uncertain path for obtaining a permanent position. Other reasons for leaving the field, although quoted by a lower percentage of participants, were: interest in other domains; lack of satisfaction at work; and family reasons. The majority of participants (63%) who left high-energy physics are currently working in the private sector, often in information technology, advanced technologies and finance domains, where they occupy a wide range of positions and responsibilities. Those in the public sector are mainly involved in academia or education.

For persons who left the field, several skills developed during their experience at CERN are considered important in their current work. The overall satisfaction of participants with their current position was high or very high for 78% of respondents, while 70% of respondents considered CERN’s impact on finding a job outside high-energy physics as positive or very positive. CERN’s services and networks, however, are not found to be very effective in helping finding a new job – a situation that is being addressed, for example, by the recently launched CERN alumni programme.

Theorists participating in the second questionnaire mainly have permanent or tenure-track positions. A large majority of them spent time at CERN’s theory department with short- or medium-term contracts, and this experience seems to improve participants’ careers when leaving CERN for a national institution. On average, about 35% of a theorist’s scientific publications originate from collaborations started at CERN, and a large fraction of theorists (96%) declared that they are satisfied or highly satisfied with their experience at CERN.

Conclusions

As with all such surveys, there is an inherent risk of bias due to the formulation of the questions and the number and type of participants. In practice, only between 20 and 30% of the targeted populations responded, depending on the addressed community, which means the results of the poll cannot be considered as representative of the whole CERN population. Nevertheless, it is clear that the impact of CERN on people’s careers is considered by a large majority of the people polled to be mostly positive, with some areas for improvement such as training and supporting the careers of those who choose to leave CERN and high-energy physics.

In the future this study could be made more significant by collecting similar information on larger samples of people, especially former CERN users. In this respect, the CERN alumni programme could help build a continuously updated database of current and former CERN users and also provide more support for people who decide to leave high-energy physics.

The final results of the survey, mostly in terms of statistical plots, together with a detailed description of the methods used to collect and analyse all the data, have been documented in a CERN Yellow Report, and will also be made available through a dedicated web page.

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Advances in particle physics are driven by well-defined innovations in accelerators, instrumentation, electronics, computing and data-analysis techniques. Yet our ability to innovate depends strongly on the talents of individuals, and on how we continue to attract and foster the best people. It is therefore vital that, within today’s ever-growing collaborations, individual researchers feel that their contributions are recognised adequately within the scientific community at large.

Looking back to the time before large accelerators, individual recognition was not an issue in our field. Take Rutherford’s revolutionary work on the nucleus or, more recently, Cowan and Reines’ discovery of the neutrino – there were perhaps a couple of people working in a lab, at most with a technician, yet acknowledgement was at a global scale. There was no need for project management; individual recognition was spot-on and instinctive.

As high-energy physics progressed, the needs of experiments grew. During the 1980s, experiments such as UA1 and UA2 at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) involved institutions from around five to eight countries, setting in motion a “natural evolution” of individual recognition. From those experiments, in which mentoring in family-sized groups played a big role, emerged spontaneous leaders, some of whom went on to head experimental physics groups, departments and laboratories. Moving into the 1990s, project management and individual recognition became even more pertinent. In the experiments at the Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP), the number of physicists, engineers and technicians working together rose by an order of magnitude compared to the SPS days, with up to 30 participating institutions and 20 countries involved in a given experiment.

Today, with the LHC experiments providing an even bigger jump in scale, we must ask ourselves: are we making our immense scientific progress at the expense of individual recognition?

Group goals

Large collaborations have been very successful, and the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC had a big impact in our community. Today there are more than 5000 physicists from institutions in more than 40 countries working on the main LHC experiments, and this mammoth scale demands a change in the way we nurture individual recognition and careers. In scientific collaborations with a collective mission, group goals are placed above personal ambition. For example, many of us spend hundreds of hours in the pit or carry out computing and software tasks to make sure our experiments deliver the best data, even though some of this collective work isn’t always “visible”. However, there are increasing challenges nowadays, particularly for young scientists who need to navigate the difficulties of balancing their aspirations. Larger collaborations mean there are many more PhD students and postdocs, while the number of permanent jobs has not increased equivalently; hence we also need to prepare early-career researchers for a non-academic career.

To fully exploit the potential of large collaborations, we need to bring every single person to maximum effectiveness by motivating and stimulating individual recognition and career choices. With this in mind, in spring 2018 the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) established a working group to investigate what the community thinks about individual recognition in large collaborations. Following an initial survey addressing leaders of several CERN and CERN-recognised experiments, a community-wide survey closed on 26 October with a total of 1347 responses.

Community survey

Participants expressed opinions on several statements related to how they perceive systems of recognition in their collaboration. More than 80% of the participants are involved in LHC experiments and researchers from most European countries were well represented. Just less than half (44%) were permanent staff members at their institute, with the rest comprising around 300 PhD students and 440 postdocs or junior staff. Participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement with a list of statements related to individual recognition. Each answer was quantified and the score distributions were compared between groups of participants, for instance according to career position, experiment, collaboration size, country, age, gender and discipline. Some initial findings are listed over the page, while the full breakdown of results – comprising hundreds of plots – is available at https://ecfa.web.cern.ch.

Conferences: “The collaboration guidelines for speakers at conferences allow me to be creative and demonstrate my talents.” Overall, participants from the LHCb collaboration agree more with this statement compared to those from CMS and especially ATLAS. For younger participants this sentiment is more pronounced. Respondents affirmed that conference talks are an outstanding opportunity to demonstrate to the broader community their creativity and scientific insight, and are perceived to be one of the most important aspects of verifying the success of a scientist.

Publications: “For me it is important to be included as an author of
all collaboration-wide papers.” Although the effect is less pronounced for participants from very large collaborations, they value being included as authors on collaboration-wide publications. The alphabetic listing of authors is also supported, and at all career stages. Participants had divided opinions when it came to alternatives.

Assigned responsibilities: “I perceive that profiles of positions with responsibility are well known outside the particle-physics community.” The further away from the collaboration, the more challenging it becomes to inform people about the role of a convener, yet the selection as a convenor is perceived to be very important in verifying the success of a scientist in our field. The majority of the participating early-career researchers are neutral or do not agree with the statement that the process of selecting conveners is sufficiently transparent and accessible.

Technical contributions: “I perceive that my technical contributions get adequate recognition in the particle-physics community.”  Hardware and software technical work is at the core of particle-physics experiments, yet it remains challenging to recognise these contributions inside, but especially outside, the collaboration.

Scientific notes: “Scientific notes on analysis methods, detector and physics simulations, novel algorithms, software developments, etc, would be valuable for me as a new class of open publications to recognise individual contributions.” Although participants have very diverse opinions when it comes to making the internal collaboration notes public, they would value the opportunity to write down their novel and creative technical ideas in a new class of public notes.

Beyond disseminating the results of the survey, ECFA will reflect on how it can help to strengthen the recognition of individual achievements in large collaborations. The LHC experiments and other large collaborations have expressed openness to enter a dialogue on the topic, and will be invited by ECFA to join a pan-collaboration working group. This will help to relate observations from the survey to current practices in the collaborations, with the aim of keeping particle physics fit and healthy towards the next generation of experiments.

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