This event offers an insight into career opportunities outside of academia. Various former members of the LHC collaborations will give presentations and be part of a panel discussion and elaborate on their experience in companies in a diverse range of fields (industry, finance, IT,...). There will be opportunities to ask questions during the panel discussion, the break and after the event. Refreshments and light snacks will be served during the break and after. The event is supported by the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb Collaborations as well as the CERN Alumni Programme and the CERN HR Department.. Attendance is limited but we do welcome participants from other experiments and other sectors at CERN. Registration is obligatory and a fee of 10 CHF must be paid in advance. Information on payment methods can be found in the Payment box on the home page.
Alexandra holds a PhD from Université Sud Paris (Paris XI) in particle physics and worked on the “CP violation studies on the B0 → DK*0 decays and hadronic trigger performance with the LHCb detector at CERN”. Currently, she works for EDF (Electricité de France), the French main electricity company. She is a project leader in scientific computing, at the Research and Development department of the company. Her job is to lead the development of EDF's computing simulation platform for industrial studies (SALOME platform, www.salome-platform.org), in particular, its tools oriented to data pre- and post-processing. The SALOME platform is used by EDF's engineers to perform computations for safety checks of current power plants, or for designing new ones. She also performs computing in neutronics applied to nuclear reactors studies. This relates to her PhD at LHCb (see above) by the computing skills required, which are the same for both jobs.
Doga holds a PhD in physics of the MIT during which she worked on heavy-ion collisions and continued this research during her fellowship at CERN. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow in the Park lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. She is interested in identifying genomic markers that can be used in clinics to improve treatment decision for cancer, and to study mechanisms that lead to resistance. She did extensive work on mutational processes in cancer, and algorithms to study the specific pattern of mutations caused by these processes called “signatures”. The mutational signatures of DNA damage repair mechanisms are of particular interest to her since patients with these deficiencies respond better to targeted treatments and immunotherapy. She developed a new tool called SigMA which can be used in clinics to detect signatures from low mutation counts. Currently, she is pursuing the new exciting possibilities SigMA opened up.
Mait Müntel is an entrepreneur with a background in particle physics. He received his PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2008 from the University of Tartu. He joined the CMS experiment at CERN while a PhD student in 2004 and left after the discovery of Higgs boson in 2013.
He had the idea of using the same algorithms from particle physics to help others learn languages 10 times more efficiently. Lingvist is its embodiment, a company with millions of users and a team of 40 people, including the core technology team leader and co-founder of Skype.
Mait was named among the 100 most influential EdTech leaders in 2015. He has since co-founded Fermi Energy. It will build the first small modular nuclear power plant in Europe.
An avid traveller, Mait has climbed the highest active volcano in Kamchatka and has reached the peak of Mont Blanc 10 times
Andre came to CERN in 1997 to pursue a master degree performing simulations for the CMS experiment. For his PhD, he searched for the Higgs boson with the L3 experiment at LEP. In 2002 he moved back to the CMS experiment where he could work on many different aspects, including firmware development, detector simulation, physics analysis and interpretation with several institutes. From 2010 on his main focus was on the CMS Data Acquisition system. End of 2018 he moved to the industry as a software engineer for Oculus Virtual Reality headsets at Facebook.
The Entrepreneurship Team in the Knowledge Transfer group work with enabling CERNies to find entrepreneurship as a possible career path after ending their contract. We do this by hosting meet-ups, providing coaching, tools, and sharing our network with people at CERN that are interested in creating a start-up.
Stop by our stand during the break
Break with food and drinks
Barbara holds a PhD in elementary particle physics from VU University Amsterdam and was a member of the LHCb experiment. She developed tracking reconstruction software and performed analysis. For 2 years she was the operation coordinator of the LHCb experiment, where she discovered that she loves project management. When she decided to leave the research field she wanted to change completely and follow her second passion in life: sport. She says: "What maybe could be interesting in my story is that I really challenge the sentence that often we feel in the research field: " physicists can do any job" ”.
Currently she works at UEFA where she is part of the Planning and Services unit in the Football Department, where she is in charge of coordinating all the experts (ranging from legal department to the stadium, to social responsibility, to mobility, to accommodation, to financial matters, etc..) during the bidding process.
She sees many links between her current job and the work she performed as operation coordinator of the entire LHCb experiment. There are many different domains, with experts who have a deep understanding of their part but not an overall view. Her role is to lead them ensuring that the puzzle works perfectly. This requires a lot of knowledge in each domain, quick problem solving, analytical skills to understand, analyse and connect all the pieces and human interaction skills to deal with very different personality and bring the best out of them.
Michele holds a PhD from the University of Cagliari. As a physicist, he studied heavy-ion collisions in the NA60 and ALICE collaborations. He coverd many different roles, from the development of readout electronics to phsyics analysis. He convened several Alice working gruops, and was one of the coordinators of the inter-experimental machine learning group.
Currently, he works as a Data Scientist at Procter and Gamble in Geneva, where he collaborates to European and global projects, building models and measurement capabilities for digital advertisement.
He believes that both the technical skills (data analysis and distributed computing) and the soft skills (working in a large international organization with complex reporting lines) he developed as a physicist are very helpful in his new role.
Mireia holds a PhD in Particle Physics from the University of Oxford, where she worked on multijet events in Standard Model measurements and supersymmetry searches using data from the ATLAS experiment.
Currently, she is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge and Cancer Research UK, and holds one of the inaugural Borysiewicz Biomedical Science Fellowships of the University of Cambridge. She is the co-Chair of the Computational Group of the Mark Foundation Institute for Integrative Cancer Medicine. Mireia also works at the intersection between science and policy, as Director of the Healthcare Innovation programme of the Center for the Governance of Change at IE University in Spain.
Her research focuses on predictive models of cancer treatment based on the integration of imaging and molecular data using machine learning and 3D printing. She previously worked on image-based hypoxia modelling at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where she was also co-Chair of the New York Science and Education Policy Association.
She has received multiple awards for her work, including the Springer Award for outstanding theses in the physical sciences, the Winton Prize for statistical analysis of data, the New York Hall of Science award for “an entrepreneur whose work is making a real difference in the world”, and most recently the Cofinitive “One To Watch” award.
Robindra holds a PhD in high energy physics from the University of Bonn and was a member of the ATLAS experiment. After leaving CERN/HEP/academia, he joined a multi-disciplinary public advisory body tasked to provide analyses and policy advice to the Norwegian parliament on societal opportunities, challenges and pitfalls associated with new technologies. Analysis techniques he had seen in research at CERN were being employed in other domains with both benefits and drawbacks. With “Big data” and “AI” as key focus areas, a recurring theme was how the ongoing digital transformation of society might shape future public services and institutional practices. They also explored policy pathways to harness opportunities and mitigate challenges.
Currently, he works as a data scientist in a newly established machine learning unit within the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV). NAV manages roughly 1/3 of the national budget and provides a wide range of services to the population, covering benefits related to childbirth, parental leave, unemployment, sick leave, disability and public pensions amongst others. His work explores opportunities for innovative and responsible use of data and machine learning to improve public services, with a key focus on privacy-preserving techniques and bias mitigation in data science and machine learning pipelines.
The solid analytical training from the analysis activities at CERN are proving useful to this day, but equally, so the skills and “savviness” one acquires engaging in a diverse collaboration like ATLAS.
Break with food and drinks