Although he was a self-professed ‘bookworm’ up until his PhD days at Panjab University, Nitesh Soni somehow never expected to become a research scientist. “I was actually preparing for the Indian Administrative Services exam,” he recalls, an essential step on the path to becoming a Police Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner. “So I just joined particle physics research for a second option. But then after four months, my supervisor sent me to Japan, which changed my life.”

Up until that point, friends and relatives had been encouraging Nitesh to pursue an administrative career, and he hadn’t had an opportunity to think outside of that particular box.

“When I was in KEK, you know, the Japanese are very hard working… they were really dedicated to these experiments, and somehow I got the same feeling. So that was my turning point,” he smiles.

It was also his culinary turning point. Japanese restaurants had little to offer vegetarians, and tempura started to get tiresome, so Nitesh would club together with other Indian friends, to socialise and prepare meals that reminded them of home.

He spent a total of 2.5 years stationed in Japan – over 80 per cent of his PhD – in stretches of six to eight months at a time. When that came to an end, he swapped Belle for Babar, experiments which are “pretty much in competition with each other, in terms of B-physics”.

“I wanted to get more exposure,” he considers. “When you’re a PhD student, you do a lot of things because someone says do something. But when you’re doing a postdoc, you become more confident when you handle your projects independently.” This time, he was mainly based at his new institute – the University of Birmingham – but he made short visits to SLAC to take shifts on the experiment and attend collaboration meetings.

It was during this first postdoc, in November 2006, that he married his now wife, Shalini. The two had met on one of Nitesh’s trips home to India during his PhD. “My parents actually went to my wife’s family home and proposed the marriage,” he explains, although this was not a traditional arranged marriage: “Well, they felt ‘ok, these kids are interested’ and that’s it.”

For his next postdoc, Nitesh changed country and changed direction – moving to the University of Alberta in Canada in October 2008, to work on hadronic physics with ATLAS. “I thought it was a good time to make a transition, because the next decade will be dominated by LHC physics,” he explains of the subject-shift. As for the location, he was looking for an English-speaking base country to allow Shalini to make use of her training as a chemistry teacher.

“Our first winter was very hard there,” he remembers. Growing up in Hamirpur, a small town in Himachal Pradesh state, northern India, with a typical temperature range of 0°C to 40°C had not prepared him for the -40°C Edmonton winter. “It was a horrible, horrible experience!” he laughs in hindsight.

But it isn’t all bad; in the summer, they discovered the Rocky mountains: “That is a wonderful place. If you would ask me, I would tell you that it is a Heaven on Earth.”

In spite of this, Nitesh is adamant that hiking is not for him. Instead, he prefers to watch cricket and comedy films, to travel to new places, and to dine out with his family: ”Mostly we like Italian food and the traditional English breakfast. It’s very interesting for us somehow!”

The family has grown recently, with the arrival of new son Shanit on December 14th. His name is a combination of those of his parents, an invention of Nitesh’s which a Google search later revealed to mean ‘marvellous’. “The baby is keeping us busy all the time.” he smiles.

At work, most of his time is being absorbed by his software project: the Beam Separation Scan Package. He is creating an interface between the various luminosity detectors and the LHC during beam scanning periods, the results of which will be useful for making absolute luminosity measurements in the initial stages of data-taking.

When he’s not doing that, Nitesh is looking at Standard Model physics: “My interest is to measure the double ratio of W + n jets to Z + n jets, where n is zero to six,” he explains. “For now, it’s still in the preliminary stage and it will take time to mature.”

Indeed, he expects it will take seven or eight months before he starts seeing results from this analysis, by which time he hopes he and his family will be stationed at CERN. Ultimately though, after so much moving, India is calling Nitesh home.

“I’m really working very hard on my various things, but I’ve already gained enough experience now. Probably I’m ready to go back to India,” he considers. “My dream is to lead research from the front in India. My target to go back is 2011, but it could happen at any time…”