Ailsa Sparkes Memorial Lecture: 'Particles and People'

*Join us for tea and cakes at 16.30 outside Lecture Theatre A in JCMB prior to this talk.* 

Professor Fabiola Gianotti, Director General of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, will talk about ‘Particles and People - Crossing boundaries through research and much more at CERN’. 

CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, is one of the largest centres for fundamental research in the world. Following the ground-breaking discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, researchers at CERN are now studying the properties of this very special particle and looking for physics beyond the Standard Model, which may be able to answer outstanding questions such as what is Dark Matter, and why is there predominantly only matter in our Universe but no anti-matter. The physics prospects of current and future projects at CERN are discussed including the upgrade of the LHC. The talk also describes the numerous cutting-edge technologies developed at CERN, which also benefit society, and the role of CERN in connecting people across boundaries by attracting 17,000 scientists from all over the world, representing more than 110 nationalities.

Fabiola Gianotti has worked on many Particle Physics Experiments at CERN experiments (UA2’, ALEPH, ATLAS), covering detector R&D and construction, software development and data analysis. She has been involved in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project since the early ‘90s and from March 2009 to February 2013 she held the elected position of the Spokesperson of the ATLAS Experiment. On 1st January 2016 she became Director-General of CERN where she is now leading the  organisation though a challenging series of upgrades as well as diversification of its programme.

This lecture is in memory of Ailsa Sparkes, who studied for a PhD in the particle physics group at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 2013. She passed away in February 2016.