Prof. Olivier Schneider
After his thesis defense in particle physics in 1989 at University of Lausanne, Olivier Schneider joins LBL, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (California), to work on the CDF experiment at the Tevatron in Fermilab (Illinois), first as a research fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and later as a post-doc at LBL. He participates in the construction and commissioning of the first silicon vertex detector to operate successfully at a hadron collider; this detector enabled the discovery of the sixth quark, named "top". Since 1994, he comes back to Europe and participates in the ALEPH experiment at CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider, as CERN fellow and then as CERN scientific staff. He specializes in heavy flavour physics. In 1998, he becomes associate professor at University of Lausanne, then extraordinary professor at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 2003, and finally full professor at EPFL in 2010. Having worked since 1997 on the preparation of the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which started operation in 2009, he is now analyzing the first data. He also contributes since 2001 to the exploitation of the data recorded at the Belle experiment (KEK laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan). These two experiments study mainly the decays of hadrons containing a b quark, as well CP violation, i.e. the non-invariance under the symmetry between matter and antimatter.
Prof. Hans Peter Beck
Hans Peter Beck completed is PhD in physics at the University of Zurich in 1996. Hans Peter spent then a bit less than a year working as a consultant and engineer for industry in Zürich before taking up a position with the University of Bern in order to start setting up the ATLAS experiment from a very early stage. He has been working on the ATLAS trigger and data acquisition system (TDAQ), he was influential in the design and implementation of the system for event data flow – from the readout through the high-level trigger system, to event building and data storage. He currently chairs the ATLAS TDAQ institutional board, comprising 73 ATLAS institutions. He has occupied since then a position of senior physicist at CERN, participating mainly in the ATLAS experiment. He also held and still occupies a Lecturer position at the Bern university.
Dr. Maxwell Hansen
Theoretical physicist at CERN
Current research:
Lattice field theory, quantum chromodynamics, quantum field theory
Max Hansen completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and his PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. He then completed a three-year postdoc at Mainz before beginning a fellowship in the CERN theory group in November of last year. His research is focused on the strong nuclear force, the force that holds together quarks and gluons in hadrons as well as nucleons within nuclei. More specifically, Max works on numerical calculations of strong-force properties based in a method called lattice QCD.
Dr. Maria Giulia Ratti
Maria Giulia Ratti graduated in 2014 from the University of Milan. It is at the same university that she started a PhD in particle physics within the ATLAS collaboration and obtained her title in 2018. Her research interest mainly lies in the search for dark matter particles and in general new particles beyond the Standard Model. She has now joined the CMS collaboration and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich.
Oliver Keller
Oliver Keller worked several years as an R&D engineer designing mechatronic and embedded systems in the industrial sectors of Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Munich in Germany, before joining CERN in 2013. The thesis of his second degree, M.Sc. in applied physics, was carried out in the CERN Media Lab and resulted in a novel tool to visualise radioactivity by combining CERN's pixel detector technology with means of augmented reality. He is currently developing an open platform for the Timepix3 pixel detector and corresponding physics experiments within a PhD project in cooperation with the University of Geneva and CERN's S'Cool LAB. Oliver is passionate about hands-on education, making things and an advocate of open standards, data & methods.