It was Santa Claus who first introduced TileCal data quality coordinator Andrea Dotti to “serious science”, when he was just 12 years old. “Since I was a small kid, I was more skilled in maths,” he explains. “I never liked to learn poems by heart, history was not my thing…” But the year Andrea received a chemistry set for Christmas he was immediately hooked, his interest fostered by a kind elderly pharmacist who sold him supplies.

ATLAS got a little taste of Tinseltown on February 12th, as director Ron Howard, and actors Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer rolled into town to promote their new film – an adaption of Dan Brown’s bestseller Angels and Demons.

You may already know the head of the Secretariat, Connie Potter, but you may not be familiar with all of the women who help keep the ATLAS collaboration running smoothly. Sitting around a table with Petya Lilova (Bulgarian), Kate Richardson (British), Christine Demirdjian (French), and Claire Gibon (French), the team of the ATLAS Secretariat, the first question was: “What work in ATLAS falls to the Secretariat?”

Even after 40 years living between Britain and Geneva, New York is still audible in the voice of Eric Eisenhandler. He grew up in the Bronx – “the North Bronx” he quickly corrects, lest we imagine the violence and urban decay that South Bronx came to symbolize.

Over Christmas, we followed the progress of ATLAS collaborator, Katharine Leney, as she and her boyfriend Pierre drove across Europe and Africa in a beaten up second hand car, to raise money for development charities working in Africa.

Physics, as a discipline, isn’t short of references to symmetry and balance. The tale of Anna and Lucia Di Ciaccio though is almost poetic in the way it weaves. They are non-identical twins, and interviewing them is both slightly surreal and a complete delight.

The full ATLAS Experiment has been operational and taking cosmic ray data since September 2008, and high-energy collisions are scheduled for late summer 2009. Data from cosmic rays that hit the ATLAS detector are valuable to calibrate and synchronize the many detector elements. Even more exciting were the so-called “splash events” that occurred as the LHC was being tuned up starting 10 September 2008.

Anna Kaczmarska is an artistic Polish physicist working as a software developer of the official ATLAS software package designed to detect tau leptons. Since Anna was a teenager, she has loved medieval arts: literature, architecture and music, whose rhythms, she says, help her to program ATLAS software.

“I think the money put in the summer school is among the best ways that CERN has to invest money!” says Jonas Strandberg, a Swedish physicist working on the Muon Spectrometer and Higgs Physics at ATLAS. He is another good example of the power of the CERN Summer School in drawing outstanding students into particle physics; since Jonas first came to CERN in the summer of 1998 as a physics undergraduate student, he always wanted to return.

“I’ve always been an outdoors person,” says Chris Oram, echoing the sentiments of many an Alp- and Jura-hiking CERN physicist. It may come as a surprise that he spent years of study in central London, starting out at Bedford College, London University, which stood in one of the city’s largest parks. He studied physics there and proceeded to Queen Mary College of London for his PhD. However, he did his research in Vancouver, Canada.

For SCT Project Leader, Pippa Wells, thoughts of precision, timing, collaborative working, and getting things to work in harmony are familiar to her both in and out of work. Her passion is playing the violin – specifically in orchestras. “It’s always been playing music with other people that has motivated me,” says Pippa, who picked up her first instrument when she was just six years old.

If the ATLAS detector assembly could be compared to a marathon, then Amelia Maio would be best described as a long-distance runner! This Portuguese physicist and Associate Professor at Lisbon University has been involved in the design of the ATLAS detector since its very conception. In addition, since the late 1980s, Amelia has also been a very active ‘outreach’ physicist.

Zuzana Zajacova found her way to ATLAS through a slightly unusual route. Rather than being a particle physicist or engineer, she comes from a background of biomedical physics.

Last summer, Seda Persembe joined the CERN Summer Students after receiving the Engin Arik fellowship, which was set up last December in memory of Turkish professor Engin Arik. After this unique experience, this fresh Physics graduate from Ankara University is now back at CERN as a research student working with Metin Arik, Engin’s husband.

When ATLAS physicist Andi Salzburger finished his PhD in May 2008, he thought of doing something really special to celebrate such a milestone in his life. He ended up walking 430Km, traveling the whole length of Iceland from North to South on foot.

Talking to Steve Lloyd, you can’t help but get the sense that the influence of this softly spoken, polite Brit is woven into the very fabric of CERN. As the author of the improved ATLAS Computing Workbook, he has certainly touched the working lives of all new members of ATLAS since 2005, but his reach extends further than that.

Alex Harvey’s path to particle physics is rather uncommon. He is now a PhD student at Hampton University working in the ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) group. But when Alex was only twenty years old, he had to put on hold getting a physics degree to make a living and that happened to be working in a casino. It was only after seventeen years of a successful career in several gambling houses that Alex went back to his true vocation.

Soshi Tsuno didn’t know much about particle physics until he met professor Hiroshi Takeda in his fourth year at Kobe University in 1996. At the time, ATLAS collaborators there were already developing the thin gap muon chambers (TGCs) that reside in both the large and small wheels, and Soshi joined this work.

Walk through Restaurant 1 at about 1 p.m. on a weekday, and you can’t fail to notice the plethora of languages being spoken. Not only that, the diversity of accents twisting themselves around English or French conversations reveals just how many nationalities are represented at CERN. Nevertheless, listening to Anthony Morley mid-flow is still a bit of a novelty, given that he’s one of only a handful of Australians working on-site on ATLAS.

Thijs Cornelissen is a Dutch physicist in the ATLAS Data Processing (ADP) group, working on track reconstruction. In these busy days closer to the switch on of the detector, Thijs is writing code to make ready the ATLAS track software, but he also manages to find time to follow his other passion: flying.

ATLAS experimenters celebrated today as the first beams circulated the Large Hadron Collider in both directions. While everyone was cheering in the LHC control room, the cheers were echoed in the ATLAS and other control rooms, and in several auditoriums around CERN.

Vato Kartvelishvili credits his presence at CERN to a man he never met. George Chikovani, the first Georgian to come to CERN, despite the Iron Curtain in the early 1960s, is an inspiration to him. “He started it all, certainly from Georgian side,” says Vato. Inventor of the streamer chamber, his legacy lives on in ATLAS itself as many subdetectors are advanced models based on his design.

This time the outside ATLAS overview week was held in a somewhat unusual venue for a physics meeting. All the plenary sessions were organized inside the VIP area of the famous soccer stadium "Stade de Suisse" just outside the city center of Bern. I was one of the few participants of the meetings that had previously been in this stadium and moreover I was honored to be the coach of one of the two ATLAS soccer teams composed specially for the meeting. Thus when I was asked to give my impressions from the meeting, I thought I should mostly share my analysis and personal view of the first ATLAS soccer game and I happily accepted.

Good luck has winked at Raul Murillo all his life, and he has seized his opportunities. The story of this Catalan engineer working on the ATLAS TDAQ group is full of remarkable coincidences.

Marc Dobson plays something of a lynchpin role at ATLAS; he’s one of those utterly essential people whose true value you only discover when things are going wrong and all Hell is breaking loose.