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Introducing LHC Lunch

Door to Restaurant 1 at CERN. Image: Amy Dusto

Editor’s note: This article comes from US LHC intern Amy Dusto, who is currently working as a communicator at CERN. She is introducing LHC Lunch, a series of articles and videos she created while getting to know some of the members of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider from U.S. institutions.

The busy cafeteria known as Restaurant 1 is generally The Place to meet anyone at CERN. So, in order to gather stories from U.S.-based researchers working here, I met with eight of them over lunch.

The people I interviewed are experimentalists, students, professors and career changers. They represent each of the four main experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. They followed different paths to CERN but share similar goals in science.

I’ve written a story for each of them, captured their voices on camera and – why not? – also documented what they ate. All this is set to appear on a new page of the US LHC website called LHC Lunch.

Every Tuesday and Thursday this month, LHC Lunch will add another physicist to the page. Today we begin with University of Michigan graduate student Shannon Walch, who has been energized by the mysteries of physics since her high school days in Highland, Utah.

The series will also feature:

  • Ricardo Vasquez Sierra, a CMS physicist who was intimately involved in a one-of-a-kind installation deep underground before the LHC first started running.
  • Anna Phan, a postdoc from LHCb who has flown around the world for physics.
  • Mauro Cosentino, a former banker who has found happiness in research at ALICE.
  • Helena Malbouisson, a CMS researcher from Brazil who grew up in a family of physicists and artists before picking her own path in the study of particles.
  • Sheldon Stone, a professor who balances teaching at Syracuse with research at CERN in the LHCb experiment.
  • Jacob Searcy, a graduate student on ATLAS who is inspired to do what he does by considering the big picture.
  • Peter Jacobs, an ALICE researcher who has watched CERN’s rise over his decades of work in nuclear and particle physics.

You can find them all here as they appear. See you at lunch!