Salsa, singing, sight-seeing and skiing are all high on the list of ways to relax and unwind for up-beat PhD student Laura González Silva. “Dancing, I loved it always. I try to go as often as I can,” she smiles. Back in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Laura was part of a choir too, but in Geneva her vocal talents are mainly consigned to karaoke bars or her shower. “Singing and dancing – they’re a part of me,” she grins. “I forget about everything. And it’s good after spending ten-hours-a-day in front of the computer!”

Some of Laura’s time spent in front of a computer has been pretty exciting though. In 2007, she was one of the first people to see particles – cosmic muons – going through the detector while she was working on trigger commissioning.

Laura has spent at least five months at CERN each year for the last three years, first in association with her Masters and then with her PhD. She made the trips as part of the EU-funded HELEN (High Energy Physics Latin-American European Network) Program, which ran from 2005 to 2009. The program provided salaries to Latin American students to enable them to come to work at High Energy Physics facilities in Europe.

By Laura’s reckoning, she is one of fewer than ten people working on experimental particle physics in the whole of Argentina. “There are people working on nuclear physics, and even on particle physics, but they’re theorists – they work on phenomenology,” she says. The lack of available funds in Latin America for building large experiments forces most people to take the theory route. Programs like HELEN will help promote experimental particle physics in Latin America, and Laura hopes to play her own part in spreading the word too.

“It’s great to be here at CERN working with people, learning from them and interacting with them,” she begins, “but it’s also important that we work at our own universities and show other students what it is like to work on an experiment.”

After enjoying her time as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Buenos Aires, Laura recently discovered that she also relishes the challenge of trying to explain her work at ATLAS in very basic terms: “When the LHC start-up was going on, I was on the phone to someone from a radio in Buenos Aires, and they asked, ‘So what is this LHC thing?’,” she recalls. “Wow – that’s hard using only the physics people learned in school! But I think if you’re a physicist and you’re able to communicate what you’re doing to a public audience, that means you really understand what you’re doing.”

Laura enjoys explaining things so much in fact that she now hopes to do more in the field of science communication, and perhaps eventually even something with books or magazines. For now though, she is very content to be involved in the ATLAS Experiment: “I felt really part of this,” she says, describing how it felt to be an ambassador for the experiment when she spoke to the Argentinean press on September 10th.

At the end of April this year, Laura comes to the end of her longest stint at CERN – nine months in total. During this period, she helped commission and test the cosmic trigger and is now studying jet reconstruction and calibration with the calorimeter. Once back in Argentina, she will have courses and exams to take as part of her PhD.

“It’s weird because when I’m here I’m working, but when I go back, I go back to my student life,” she considers. In Geneva, Laura rents an apartment, but back home, like most Latin American students, she lives with her parents.

“It’s a party town!” Laura smiles about the city she’s lived in all her life, but she’s quick to see the plus points of Geneva’s diminutive status. “You can never know the whole of Buenos Aires – the conurbation is about 10 million people,” she says. “You can know Geneva a lot better, and I like that. I have ‘my places’ here, like the place I go to dance salsa.”

Laura has also taken full advantage of Geneva’s central European position, visiting cities like Rome, Venice, Florence, Paris and London, and lapping up the cultural heritage she’s discovered there. “In Latin America, in general, we don’t have the old buildings, the ancient churches around every corner, the history behind every stone,” she says. Last year, she even spent a traditional English Christmas in Oxford, which she describes as “so pretty – like being in Harry Potter!”

This was the first winter Laura had spent in Europe and, not one to pass up an opportunity, of course she learned to ski. “One of my friends said, ‘If you don’t go skiing, you won’t find anything else to do, because everybody here goes skiing!’ she laughs. “At first I was really scared – I’m not really a sporty person. But it turned out to be, after a few lessons, that it was fun!”