When exactly did her interest in science start, Pauline Gagnon cannot say. "I always wanted to know what matter was made of,” she explains. Inspired by Marie Curie, her first choice was chemistry. No wonder that nine-year-old Pauline's dearest wish for Christmas was a chemistry kit. Unfortunately it said "Recommended for ages 10 and older" on the box. So her parents opted for a microscope instead and she had to wait another year to start chemistry experiments. "The best experiment was the one producing rotten egg smell - the whole family could tell it had been successful,” she recalls. She kept the mortar and pestle from that chemistry kit and uses it today to ground spices.

Has cooking something to do with physics? Sure! There is a difference, if the meal is cooked in a clay pot or in a metal pot. In a clay pot it will take longer to heat the food up, but then the temperature will stay for a long time, even thought the oven is turned off. On the contrary the metal pot will heat up much faster, but as soon the pot is removed from the oven, the heat is nearly gone.

There is usually a defining moment, or event, that leads a person to science. For 10 year old Martin Rybar, it was the moment when he found the chemistry laboratory kit from his uncle in his parents' house. Curiosity has always been the main driving force in science – and Martin was no exception.

Eight-year-old Genevieve Steele was a little girl who knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was to play the harp. As soon as she first spotted one, while clog dancing at Sidmouth Folk Festival on England's south coast, she pretty much didn't let it out of her sight.

Year 2000, which was declared as the “year of physics” in Germany, was the very year, when Regina Kwee finished high school with the German Abitur in Berlin. She and a friend visited the particle physics exhibition “Trip to the Big Bang” and this may well have triggered her interest for this field. She was very much interested in physics, although she had an humanistic education with focus on ancient Greek and Latin.

There are many paths into science and one that might have played a key role for Takanori Kono could be LEGO bricks. Maybe it is the segmented approach learned from playing with those bricks that helped him later on tackle computer programming. It is easier to break down any problem into smaller chunks, seeing how it is put together as though it were made from basic building blocks.

Physicists are elderly men, wearing white lab coats and looking a bit like Einstein - that was the way most kids draw physicists before their visit to CERN. But, thanks to Valeria Perez Reale and her colleagues who participated in the 'Draw me a physicist' program, the way these kids see scientists changed forever. “I was happy to be interviewed and sketched by 8 years old from the Geneva and Pays de Gex area, who had never visited CERN before,” Valeria says. She adds, “It fills me with satisfaction to see young children interested in science and the pleasure when they learn new things that change the way they see their universe around them.”

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” we all remember Neil Armstrong saying while taking his first steps on the moon. As so many, Fred Luehring was glued to the television set that 21st of June, 1969, but to him this event meant much more than to most.

Maybe it snuck into her subconscious while she was wandering the geometrically perfect street plan of her native Euclid (yes, named after the famous 'Father of Geometry') near Cleveland, Ohio. Maybe it rubbed off on her as she discovered the intricacies of risk and probability while dealing smoky late night blackjack for her father's casino equipment hire business. Or maybe it was just pure chance. But one way or another, mathematics is in Kathy Copic's bones.

“I've always been interested in science, and questions about the universe and what makes it tick.” says Elvar Bjarkason. Like many physicists he began by being interested in general science, so still in primary school he liked mathematics, chemistry and physics, while learning about the structure of atoms. But that was just a start.

“In Sweden you can go out dancing in the summertime, where they play popular music but adapted for dancing,” says Stockholm native Bengt Lund-Jensen. Nine years ago, he decided to re-visit the dances of his undergrad days in pursuit of fitness, and now he spends his summers stepping out with other Scandinavians in the midnight twilight.

“In a sense, life is never as you've foreseen it to be. This is also true for natural laws, and that's why I like to be a physicist so much,” Pascal Pralavorio says as he explains what makes discovery so interesting for him.

Going into his new position with Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand ('Wits' for short), Trevor Vickey sees his brief as “a sort of linear combination between a professorship and a Peace Corps assignment”. The tenure-track Senior Lecturer post will take him to a brand new continent, but, he says, he made the original application “on a whim” after five years as an ATLAS postdoc.

For most particle physicists, memories of the dim and distant past when they couldn't yet use a computer are distinctly fuzzy. For Mahsana Ahsan, though, they're a little fresher: “I didn't have a chance to use computers during my studies due to lack of computer labs,” she explains. “When I first went to the US, I was only able to type an email very slowly.”

“I‘m very outgoing,”says Lucie de Nooij, without hesitation.“That may be a Dutch thing, but it‘s also very much me.”

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.”

Rachid Mazini grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. Although he’s now a big fan of rugged terrain, he spent his youth as a “city boy” with holidays on the Atlantic shoreline. It wasn’t until he started university in Marrakech that he began to explore the mountains – the Atlas range, in fact.

If you call Jean-Baptiste Blanchard by his full first name, try it the French way and drop the ‘p’. But he generally goes by JB.

As he munches on an all-American breakfast – fresh juice and a bagel hand-delivered by a friend from New York – Jim Degenhardt is the first to admit he’s not a morning person. It’s the aftermath of the 9 a.m. Run Meeting, a daily appointment for Jim as co-run coordinator of the TRT, but the NY-themed sustenance seems to be doing the trick.

For Rolf Seuster, there’s no place like Victoria, Canada. Located on Vancouver Island, about 90 km south of this year’s Winter Olympics, Rolf believes it’s one of the nicest places in the country. “It’s the size of Switzerland, and there’s maybe half a million people on the whole island,” he says.

It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to think of ATLAS and CMS as siblings: competing, trying to get ahead, but ultimately friendly and supportive of each other. But for Germán Carrillo, the analogy moves over into the literal, because while he studies for a PhD on ATLAS, older brother Camillo is a six-year CMS devotee.

When the time came for François Butin to do his military service for France, he wasn’t interested in the armed forces. Instead, he chose to become a “cooperant”, working for a longer period in research or engineering. “In the old days, if you wanted to do your military service in an intelligent way, that was one of the good opportunities,” says François.

Attila Krasznahorkay has physics in his blood, the son of a nuclear physicist and a physics and math teacher. He was also introduced to the traveling life style at an early age, moving from his Hungarian homeland to Groningen in the Netherlands at eight years old when his father began work in the city’s university. His young, agile brain managed to pick up the Dutch language, but now, although he recalls the experience of being fluent at age nine, he struggles to think of words.

Thorsten Wengler can still remember exactly where he was when the Berlin wall fell in November 1989: on night guard, sitting atop a pile of arms and ammunition in the woods outside of Potsdam, Germany, alongside three of his fellow East German soldiers.

If a chance meeting hadn’t led Tapas Sarangi to a PhD in Japan, things could have been very different: “I would probably have been in the Indian Navy as a commissioned officer!” he admits.

Yongsheng Gao was born in Jinan, the capital of the Shandong province of China, also the home of Confucius some 2500 years ago. The Yellow River flows by Jinan, the ‘City of the Springs’, with the Mountain Tai nearby.

Unlike most of us at CERN, Hans Peter Beck is a Swiss native. He grew up in places like Weggis, on the shore of Lake Lucerne; Wolfenschiessen, in the mountainous interior of Switzerland; Dietikon, a suburb of Zürich, and finally in Zürich itself. He completed his matura – the Swiss secondary education – at the Mathematical Natural Science Gymnasium, Rämibühl, Zürich. Although he received better marks in chemistry at the time, physics held a much stronger attraction because it delves into matter at its most basic.

Looking back, as he can now, from a position of maturity, Nabil Ghodbane is a little embarrassed about the scene that unfolded when he met Peter Higgs. “At the time, I was maybe a bit naïve,” he admits bashfully, as he recounts a tale of waiting outside the toilets after a Scottish summer school talk to greet Professor Higgs on his way out. “We were like groupies!” he laughs at himself and other students who stampeded the reluctant physics celebrity.

“The first time I came to Munich, I fell in love with the city,” says Sandra Horvat. She was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and her parents and brother still live 20 kilometres from the city, in Samobor. “It's a lovely and cosy place, one of the oldest and favourite recreation places for many Croats. I like it a lot!”

As an ATLAS physicist, it’s not often you get to stand back and look at the bigger picture, according to Richard Teuscher: “Not at all! It’s only really when you get a chance to talk to someone about what you’re doing. Day-to-day, you’re writing software or fixing some part of the detector. But at the end you think, ‘Wow, look what we’ve done!’"

Moscow has been home to Lidia Smirnova for as long as she can remember. She was born in Ukraine, her mother’s region, shortly after the end of World War II. Her father, from Siberia, had served five years in the thick of the fighting, on the Soviet side. “He was wounded twice, but was really lucky to be saved with his life,” says Lidia. He was also very lucky to be stopped in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, on his way from Germany to Japan. In that summer, 1945, he met Lidia’s mother.

Most people at CERN know Claudia Marcelloni as the ATLAS photographer and the exquisite eye behind the ATLAS book, Exploring the Mystery of Matter. But to Claudia, photography is just one tool that she could use to practice her passion: the creative communication of ideas.

Born Jorge in Argentina, George Mikenberg is a man of many aliases. He changed his name to the Hebrew Giora when he settled in Israel, but in English-speaking company, he encountered a problem: “The Anglo-Saxons cannot pronounce it, or rather they pronounce it in a way that means WC in Arabic.” And so he became George, but also Georg for the German-speaking, and Georges for his French-Swiss wife.

For Jochen Schieck, monthly trips to CERN – often spanning just one day – suit him well. The rest of the time he’s based at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Physics in Munich.

Particle physics is an endurance sport. The building of ATLAS took nearly two decades of design and construction. In the early autumn, the blast from the first colliding particles will mark the start of a multi-year race to discover new physics. This rhythm of preparation and performance is one that Adele Rimoldi knows well.

Osamu Jinnouchi had never left his native Japan when he first came to CERN, as a summer student with KEK, aged 25. “I don’t quite remember, but it was all impressive,” he ponders. “Everything was different here.”

Mountains are an enduring presence in the life of Marco Aurelio Díaz. “Wherever you are in Chile, the Andes are there, and they make an imprint in your mind that time does not erase,” he explains.

Harry Potter fans can probably sympathise with Helenka Przysiezniak Frey’s initial reaction to being profiled for e-News. “My husband tells me: do it,” she wrote in an email, but her latest reading material had left her with some reservations: “[The Harry Potter] equivalent of ATLAS e-News, the Daily Prophet, says all kinds of lies about Harry and co.”

How does Borut Kersevan spend his free time? “What free time? is the answer,” he says with a wry grin. But what little he has, he likes to spend on family, travel, and good conversation.

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!”

In his more laid-back free time, Stanislav Němeček enjoys good detective novels and a production about a fictional Czech genius by the name of Jára Cimrman. The legends of Cimrman began in radio shows but later became plays in two parts: a lecture by a “professor” about recently uncovered work by this scientist/inventor/writer/philosopher and a scene played out by actors. The idea of Cimrman has been around since 1966, beginning as sort of a comic, literary protest to Communist rule. New episodes are performed every few years. Though a fictional genius, Cimrman is a symbol of Czech pride.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ferdinand Hahn may not be strictly ATLAS, but his work on gas systems is vital to all four experiments.

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.

“I’ve always wanted to do it I guess,” considers ATLAS PhD student Kate Shaw. “It was probably books by Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose… They inspired me to start with – to understand the fundamentals of the Universe.”

Forty million beam crossings, each containing about twenty collisions, must be processed and analysed each second with only two hundred of those selected and saved for further analysis. There are no second chances! That is the challenge of the ATLAS trigger system: forefront in the analysis of new discoveries at the LHC. Srini Rajagopalan, a physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York, has taken up this challenge and is one of the scientists responsible for making sure that the trigger selects events that are rich in physics.

Like many ATLAS collaborators, Troels Petersen’s current project is not his first CERN experience. He came here a decade ago as a summer student on NA48 and NA59, working on kaons and polarised photon beams.

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.

“Of course, at the very beginning, I had no idea how complex it would be. I think most people didn't. I thought it might take two or three years, but not almost six,” says Sergei Malyukov of the ATLAS cabling project which will finally reach its completion at the end of June. As Cabling Project Coordinator, Sergei has certainly had his hands full, both metaphorically and physically.

I come from Michigan, the northern US state that looks like a mitten in the middle of the Great Lakes, and graduated from Michigan State University just last May (2007). I knew from the start that I wanted to write science and decided that professional writing and physics would be an excellent combination.

Yann Coadou may have begun his CERN fellowship just last year, but he is no stranger to the ATLAS project – it is the third time in his short career that he has worked on ATLAS.

Polish-born PhD student Katarina Pajchel moved to Norway when she was very young. She studied physics in Bergen and went on to complete a Master’s degree there too, analysing DELPHI data coming off LEP. Now part of the University of Oslo’s experimental HEP group, she has spent the last three years involved in developing Grid computing for ATLAS.

CERN holds a special place in the hearts of Christian Schmitt and Lucia Masetti. Not only are they both working on the ATLAS project, but also the recently wedded couple first met each other on the summer student programme at CERN in 1999.

All members of the ATLAS collaboration have been working to a demanding schedule over the last few years as they prepare for the LHC turn-on, but few can claim to have been as busy as Kirill Egorov, affiliated with Indiana University. In the five years since he arrived at ATLAS from the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia, Kirill has worked on the TRT Barrel, cabling, the connection of the TRT end-cap, the gas and cooling system, and the SCT. His next task is helping with the cooling system for the pixel detector.

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.

Anyone working on the ATLAS experiment right now will agree that it is more than a full-time job. But Monica Dunford is not your average woman. On top of working on the Tile Calorimeter, helping to commission the Level-one Trigger, and coordinating Tile Cal’s operation running, she somehow finds the time and energy to row, ski, run marathons, and tell the world about life here at ATLAS.

Ned Spencer may be a key member of the ATLAS grounding and shielding team, but he came to physics at the relatively late age of 32. “All through my twenties I spent a lot of time at the San Francisco Zen Center,” he says. “Zen Buddhism is really a kind of yoga in which the main asana, or position, is sitting cross-legged.” That was something Ned had difficulties with. “I began to have trouble with the nerves in my legs so I couldn’t sit and meditate much. That limited what I felt I could do in the community.”

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.

We’ve all heard the story about the End Cap Toroid magnets having only a few centimetres clearance on either side as they were eased into place in the detector last year. Well, Tatiana Klioutchnikova and her colleagues are the ones to thank for that carefully controlled close-shave not ending up in a disastrous scrape.

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.

Most ATLAS users know Emil Obreshkov only as a man at the end of a mysterious e-mail address. Ceri Perkins went along to meet the man himself, and find out a bit more about him.

When Alessandra Ciocio was given the opportunity to work on the installation of the ATLAS detector, she jumped at the chance. “I was interested in getting this detector to work,” she 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.

Geoff Tappern, Senior Installation Project Engineer at ATLAS, retired at the end of December, over thirty years after his first visit to CERN. “I came here in 1971 from Rutherford,” he says. “We were designing part of an experiment with Alan Astbury. Back then nuclear physics was still a bit of an unknown science. Cryogenics – I couldn’t even spell the word!”

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’.