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ATLAS celebrating the International Women's day!

8 March 2010 | By

Today ATLAS celebrates the role of women in physics its own way. ATLAS has encouraged its staff and users to place as many women as possible on shift in the control room and to serve as guides for official visits. These women are well qualified and trained in the corresponding tasks. The result can not be better described than in the message of Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General:

"The fact that we can do this easily may come as a surprise to those who don’t know us better, but it’s no surprise to me. Curiosity, the main prerequisite for being a researcher, is a shared characteristic of all mankind and that’s reflected in the CERN community. Men and women from all over the world come here to pursue their research, and the diversity they bring is one of our greatest assets."

Women in ATLAS control room. (Image: ATLAS Collaboration)

The message to be conveyed to all young women interested in particle physics and high technology, is that they are welcome in the field as physicists, engineers and computer scientists. The achievement of having the control room with almost all shifts covered by women shows not only that we are enough women in ATLAS collaboration to run the detector but that particle physics is a field where women play an active role at the forefront of experimental research.

About the author(s)

Isabel Pedraza

Postdoctoral researcher working with Sau Lan Wu, from the University of Wisconsin, within the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS ) Collaboration of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN (Conseil Eropéen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). She has collaborated with CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN (Conseil Européen por la Recherche Nucléaire). She is a scientist in level one of the mexican National System of Researchers (SNI 1). She holds a “Programa para el Desarrollo Profesional Docente” (PRODEP) profile awarded to professors that fulfill efficiently their duties as professor and academic advisor. She has collaborated with three of the biggest international experiments for particle and astroparticle physics: Pierre Auger, ATLAS and CMS. She performed the analysis of very horizontal showers with the Pierre Auger Observatory to search for a deviation of the proton-neutrino cross-section from the standard model. She has done data analysis for the LHC experiments since 2006. She led the first ATLAS publication on the searches for electron-nuetrino final states at high pt, looking for physics beyond the Standard Model.