What's wrong with me?

Donnerstag, 03. Juli 2025 | 17:00-18:00

Zielgruppe: Fellows

Abstract: Why are sexism, homophobia and racism still so prevalent in physics? I start from my personal experience to demonstrate that in fact the personal is political. CERN, the largest physics laboratory in the world, welcomes scientists from 112 nationalities but still about 80% of them are white and 80% are male. I examine why people from so many various groups have been historically excluded from physics and suggest a series of easily applicable measures that could greatly improve diversity in physics. These measures would benefit all scientists, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation, physical ability or religion. It has been established that diversity benefits science by increasing the creativity potential, a key ingredient in scientific research.

Guest speaker: Born in Quebec, Canada in 1955, Pauline completed a PhD in particle physics at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993. She conducted research at CERN until she retired in 2014 after participating in the Higgs boson discovery and the search for dark matter with ATLAS. In 2015, Oxford University Press published her book: Who cares about particle physics? Making sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN, which has been published in seven other languages. Over the past decade, she has given more than two hundred public talks worldwide.