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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Raksapol is both reserved and very friendly – a common Thai characteristic. In September, it will be one year since he left his native Bangkok to join, as a research assistant, the Department of Physics at the University of Geneva. This is where he is doing performance studies of the electron triggers to optimize the physics discovery potential. With his hard work, he is hoping to turn this research into a PhD project in September.

Building the ATLAS detector has been a mammoth and innovative project. Sociologists, economists, and entrepreneurs have studied how such projects benefit society and the economy. The ATLAS collaboration has a number of unique characteristics, because of the size of the project, together with its complex scientific nature. It is the largest collaborative effort ever attempted in the physical sciences with more than 2200 physicists from 38 countries.

The search for exotic particle has led Alan Litke and his ATLAS colleagues to design a system that has allowed the discovery of a new type of cell in the retina of primates, and this technology is helping to find solutions for certain types of blindness.

As the 2008 Summer Student Program is just about to start, here is an example of how the Program is successful at bringing talented physics students into the field of particle physics: “The CERN summer school changed my life,” says Sofia Chouridou, a Greek physicist working on the SCT at ATLAS. Since Sofia first came to CERN in 1995 while enrolled in Physics at the University of Thessaloniki, she always wanted to work in the biggest particle physics lab in the world.

The ATLAS collaboration is continuously expanding, and recently its message has reached new shores – South America. Three new countries, Argentina, Chile and Colombia joined the collaboration at the beginning of the year, when Peter Jenni, ATLAS spokesperson, signed collaboration agreements formalising the presence of the Latin American research teams within the ATLAS experiment.

When the Venezuelan Antonio Cárdenas discovered the program HELEN –the High Energy Physics Latin American European network – he did not doubt it a second and applied for it. For this physics student from the University of Los Andes in Venezuela, HELEN was a unique chance to come to Europe and get hands on particle physics, a field that he had only read about in books before.

Kamal Benslama is a young professor of physics leading the ATLAS-Regina group, a recently formed and international high energy physics research team at the University of Regina in Canada. The group was set up in 2006, and all its members - Kamal, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students are devoting their efforts to the ATLAS detector. Their research operates on two fronts: the Liquid Argon calorimeter and the High Level Trigger.

As happens with many good things in life, Steve Goldfarb came across physics by chance: “When I went to undergraduate school, I was planning to become a medical doctor,” says Steve. The revelation moment happened when he opened an organic chemistry textbook. That was when he realized that what he had found seductive in chemistry were the rules that dictate the order of the chemical elements in the periodic table. “Behind those rules were fascinating physics equations,” he says.

The prospect of a life full of challenges is what brought Weina Ji to study physics at the University of Nanjing, in China. However besides the intellectual stimulation that physics provides, she also describes the field as 'useful'. "The logic that you develop while learning physics can also be applied outside this particular world if later on you don't continue in this career," she says.

It is something unusual to see a woman-engineer in pink coveralls giving instructions around. But down into the ATLAS pit, this is a matter of routine. Our main protagonist is Maarit White, the Finnish engineer who among many other installation tasks has been in charge of supervising the scaffolding. She has become a sort of an icon among her co-workers, who know her as 'the pink engineer’.

"It's amazing that you have to build something so huge to measure such extremely small things," said Tom Christiansen from Telemark in Norway, after visiting the ATLAS cavern. His sentiment about the size of the ATLAS detector was shared by the thirty–one other physics teachers who, together with Tom, attended the first Norwegian Teacher Programme run at CERN, in November 2007.