Author: admin

Miguel Mendes

Sunsets in Portugal are special. They are different and they wrap Miguel’s thoughts if someone asks him about missing something, about saudade.

This aerospace engineer was born and raised in Lisbon, but he spent a lot of time away from the capital. Both his parents come from the inside of Portugal, from rural areas located in Santarém, 100 km northeast of Lisbon. Throughout all his life, specially throughout his childhood, he was regularly going back to his grandparents house. As intermitências da infância. The summers were also a time to taste there, helping their grandparents in the fields.

He likes to make clear that he is not a pure city person and that is important because when clarifying something, we focus on lights and shades. Miguel always says that he is made of pieces from the people that he loves and from the people that like him. He feels himself as an individual who strongly depends on his loved ones. He is a determined person and, why not to say it, sometimes stubborn, as we all are.

Since October 2017, Miguel works at CERN. He is part of the Project Office of the HL-LHC Integration and (De)-installation group. Before the take-off of his professional career, Miguel studied Aerospace Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon, and a double master’s degree, “Flight Dynamics & Control and Avionics”, between Lisbon (IST) and the Netherlands, at the Delft University of Technology.

It may happen, that a regular Thursday morning, while teleworking, someone asks you, who are you? And although it looks like a very deep question, you end up answering it. Miguel considers himself as a regular guy in many aspects, which does not mean he is flat or boring. A regular guy trying to find his way in life with the people that he appreciates, never alone, that is for sure.

He might not believe in Karma, maybe a bit, but in Miguel’s head there is a mantra spinning around: quem semeia ventos, colhe tempestades. Bad feelings feed negativity, but also good feelings spread happiness, and Miguel belongs to this second team.

When he hears the word beauty, so many things come to his mind. Beauty can be found in love, and when he says love, he means a very broad number of things (which are not things) that go from his family, his girlfriend, his dogs Boss and Chefe, two german sheperds, also to nature, wild animals or a snowing mountain.

One of the heteronyms of the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, wrote that “a beleza é o nome de qualquer coisa que não existe”. He also wrote that “a realidade não precisa de mim” and Miguel disagrees: reality as a whole may not need a specific person, but Miguel’s reality needs him. No doubt.

Miguel still does not know his dreams, and there is no rush. As long as he does something that makes him happy, that makes him motivated to wake up, to go to work, to collaborate improving something while being involved in a team. As long as he enjoys with his dear ones, he feels good. No need to dream bigger.

There will be a place in the world waiting for him, with a Portuguese sunset and some bossa nova played in the background.

WP15

João Oliveira

The child that was afraid to forget any of his 60 cousins’ names. The child that saw his grandmother, always saving money for her loved ones’ future. That child was the first one, in the lifetime of the family, to attend university. That child is now a mechanical engineer who works at CERN.

Grão a grão, João is fulfilling his life’s backpack. He is a 27-years-old curious guy, eager to learn as much as possible. He loves to travel and to cook, also Science and History, and all their possible combinations.

He is from Lisbon, onde o mar se acabou e a terra espera. João has always lived in the Portuguese capital, where he studied, both bachelor’s and master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). He was a very active piece in the student community, participating in a lot of projects and, sometimes, coordinating and organizing them. A master behind the scenes.

Also in Lisbon, João met Kauanna, his girlfriend. They have been living in different countries since he started working at CERN, in October 2017, almost 3 years ago. With no doubt, this is one of the toughest parts of emigration.

That autumn, he moved to Pays de Gex, where he is very happy, working with a united team in Hi-Lumi, which, in his words, is a really fantastic project. As a mechanical engineer, in the not too distant future, he would like to be more connected to product design, closer to the industry.

In his daily adventures, João is surrounded by beauty. He finds it in the shape of fun and excitement. Also, in the variety of cultures and their common points, where we realise that we are not so different from each other.

The birth of the www at CERN or the recent rocket launched by Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, are other examples. It is this type of humanity achievements that João finds beautiful because, to him, beauty is to see that people connected are able to achieve extraordinary objectives.

A goal for us? João does not hesitate: we should improve the life as we know it and leave a mark on humanity. Everything that makes us what we are is up to us. It is up to the environment that we create, the people we surround ourselves with and the ideals that we choose to follow and to pay attention to. Isso nos baste.

João will find his own meaning on life. He will continue to face challenges, increasingly complex. And he will success and overcome them because, as José Saramago would say, sempre chegamos ao sítio aonde nos esperam.

Former WP15

Blanca Vázquez de Prada

Like Nietzsche, Blanca is a friend of the slowness. Now, from Madrid, she enjoys her own calm in the non-hegemony of the Fast & Furious. Life, like philology, demands above all to distance oneself from the rest, take time, decelerate, and our engineer lives her days on those margins.

Blanca was born at the Mediterranean’s foot, in Mojácar, a city located in Almería (Spain). After studying industrial design engineering in Seville, she worked in the Andalusian capital and also in the country’s one. Years later, she opened a door to England, and from there she jumped to CERN, where she has worked and enjoyed for five years.

She is not currently working. Her stage as a CERNie was very intense, and that is why Blanca has given herself a time of reflection, changes and rest. One way to avoid, in Nietzsche’s words, “the age of the rashness, the indecent and sweaty rush that aims to end everything immediately.” That age, which is ours, which is the Work’s one.

From that stand-by terrace, our engineer takes a look at the most special memories of that time. The disconnection from those yoga classes, which started with four cats in a park in Saint-Genis-Pouilly and grew to full capacity at CERN itself. The sweet Geneva dance academy that kept her in touch with contemporary dance that she has practiced since childhood. And, of course, those rides in a white cinquecento singing sevillanas loudly, like someone celebrating a goal in the last minutes of the game. An oasis within the High Level and the international ties.

That relaxing doses did not occur in solitude. The friendships that Blanca forged at CERN still accompany her, and she speaks, smiling, about the illusion with which they work, about their brilliant minds and their big hearts. She well remembers how excited she was when she arrived to CERN. She felt like a little girl again. It was difficult for her to shrink her smile from ear to ear when, ready for taking the photo for the access card, she was told not to smile that much. How to control so much emotion?

During her five years as a CERNie, Blanca was part of several projects. She started in civil engineering and, later on, she went to do a more mechanical design, an integration design, within the HiLumi team. She made sure that everything fit and that it was in accordance with the project’s requirements. Blanca was the link, the smiling piece that brought together the work of the different teams and departments.

She believes that it is important to find a balance between the personal demands and the enjoyment of the experience to make the most of each coffee and conversation with other CERNies, those more or less random beings who are the most beautiful things in this place. For Blanca, the beauty was in the mix, in the diversity that fitted everything, in the small big family that CERN is.

Blanca dreams now of breadcrumbs, no big loaves of bread. To engage every little wish in her daily life is enough. Go back to work? Yes, but only from a perspective of calm and serenity, because Blanca is a friend of the slow reading of life and, as Nietzsche wrote in her Aurora, reading well is reading slowly.

Former WP17

Charly Gasnier

Aglobal pandemic has frozen Charly’s dream. This French civil engineer was supposed to go travelling with no expiration date, but because of the Coronavirus outbreak in March 2020 that dream is still on stand-by.

Charly has shrunk his travel destinations for now, and after a 2-weeks hike in the Alps, and before going to the Dolomites (Italy), he is inaugurating the summer in Geneva (Switzerland). His biggest voyage started there, 4 years ago, when Charly became a CERNie.

Last February, he left CERN. He was part of the Site Management and Building Department, in the civil engineering team of the HiLumi Project, and he was always surrounded by construction plans and designs.

When he arrived it was the beginning of the design phases and the submission of the building permits. He worked together with the different consultants, advising them during all the design phases. He also participated in defining the details of the infrastructure needed for the project in collaboration with other services of CERN. Since 2018, when the construction started, Charly was in charge of following the works in the real dealing of the shafts in the tunnels. Sometimes, his office was underground, circled by beauty and interesting facts about geology.

He remembers fondly the fact of being given plenty of responsibility from his managers, and the confidence they put on him. He also remembers the CERN Open Days, when thousands of people came to gain first-hand knowledge about this huge lab. They were asking Charly and his colleagues about physics, and it was funny and curious how a group of civil engineers tried to resolve their physics doubts. Those colleagues are now what he misses the most from his days as a CERNie.

Charly has started looking for his next job, being sure that he would like to move a bit more closer to the environmental field. To know when it will be the start of his next professional experience is still a mystery. First comes the dreams.

As the French Romantic poet, Victor Hugo, wrote: voyager, c’est naître et mourir à chaque instant, and Charly still has a lot to revive.

Although the COVID-19 outbreak seems to be taken from a surrealist film, Charly’s adventures as a backpacker around the Globe will also seem it, but much better because they will be for real.

Former WP16

Paula Martínez Urios

Work in progress. This could be Paula’s current status. This could be anyone’s current status. The people that surround her, the ones that she admires and every new experience that gets her out of her comfort zone are still making Paula the person that she will be tomorrow. Today, she is the baggage of the past that was packed on the basis of some ethical principles that remained unchanged.

Originally from Madrid, Paula is now a CERNie living in Geneva. She studied the Hydraulics track of Civil Engineering in the Spanish capital and, during the 4th course, she did an Erasmus in Istanbul (Turkey). 10 months out of 27 years could seem a tiny proportion, but it is not just a matter of quantity.

Paula talks about Istanbul like a grandmother talks about her grandchildren. Same illusion, same affection. She still has the feeling that she did not discover even one percent of what the city had to give. Although Istanbul was not the first option on her Erasmus list, the Turkish city embraced her very warmly. For Paula, it was similar enough to Spain to not miss it, and different enough to surprise her every day. She never felt a foreigner there. She could taste the Mediterranean culture, the one that Serrat used to sing about.

Is the re-encounter already planned? Paula wonders very often whether she should go back, but then she remembers Sabina singing, “al lugar donde has sido feliz no debieras tratar de volver”. Irremediably, Istanbul will always keep a piece of Paula. She lost part of her scales there.

Day after day, she bumped into beauty: in its sunsets over the mosques, in the blues of the Bosphorus and in the song of the seagulls. For Paula, beauty is that characteristic of something, and by something it is really anything, that you can observe forever. And observing means if it is a song to listen to it, if it is nature to look at it, if it is a person to just be with that person. No rush with beauty.

Paula is leaving CERN next July and she will start a double master’s degree in Sustainable Energy Systems in Sweden and the Netherlands, after spending a few weeks in Madrid, where music festivals and concerts will be waiting for her, together with that “buen rollo” that does not have a literal translation outside southern Europe.

She lets herself go a bit, like the tide. She may do it after her master studies: to guide herself by intuition, which has worked so far. Because, as Xoel López would sing, “la vida siempre tiene algo preparado”.

Paula dreams of continuing looking for a path, a path that makes her happy because it is not always easy to make choices and to give direction to our lives. She always keeps in mind something that her father told her when she was a kid: “lo perfecto es enemigo de lo bueno”. And perfection is also a happiness’ enemy. Sometimes, it is even better to live a bit below perfection. Sometimes, an approximation is good enough.

Although you never feel fully ready to leave, by mid-summer, Paula will say goodbye to CERN, that world with its own microclimate and people that haven been shaping her for the past three years. Same path, different surroundings.

Like a piece of Paula stayed forever in Istanbul, another piece of her will always remain at CERN. Another particular place where she lost her scales.

WP16

Marta Bajko

In a lost corner of the world, between mountains, is where Marta’s most peaceful place lies. A place of back to the reality, back to the basis, where she charges her batteries.

She was born in Gheorgheni (Romania), a small city located in eastern Transylvania, around 175 km from “Dracula’s Castle”. She spent her first 20 years in Romania, where many of her relatives still live, but she is also linked to Hungary because of her nationality and her culture. During four years, Marta studied mechanical engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and, shortly after, she became a CERNie.

Marta is the Section Leader of the TE-MSC-TF section at CERN. She started to work here as a research engineer, in charge of the superconducting magnet design, the fabrication and the contract follow up for the LHC dipoles. For 24 years, she has been at CERN, where she has developed her whole professional career.

She likes and enjoys what she does. Maybe that is why she finds beauty even in a piece of iron. At the entrance of building SM-18, where visitors await, there is a magnet that Marta recovered from one of the old storage areas. They turned it into a table. She likes that kind of object, those engineering pieces of art.

She has always loved the mountains. Although Marta’s blue eyes were already used to nature, she feels that this particular area, near the Alps, is quite amazing, in terms of landscapes, greenery and peaks. From time to time, Marta fantasizes about climbing Mont Blanc sometime. She still has doubts about it. This may always be one of her pipe dream, her voeu pieux, as the French would say.

Her mom always told her: help yourself and God will help you. A teaching that highlights the importance of self-initiative, and willingness. Marta comes from a quite religious community. She does not believe as they do, but she respects their beliefs. She is always down to earth. Still, this is a lesson that Marta would pass on to her daughter.

In one of his novels, Panait Istrati, a Romanian working class writer, stands up for goodness, saying that the goodness of one single man is much stronger than the evil of a thousand, because evil ends when it, metaphorically, dies, but good is transmitted to others and remains even after it dies. Marta completely agrees with him. She thinks that everything is relative and that if you insist on trying to change everything in a positive way, there is always a positive side in everything. It is a question of trying to see it.

One day, Marta will return to spend more time at those lands that saw her grow, where she used to play without a care in the world. That very lost place with no electricity, water or network. A special corner that is quite difficult, but very satisfying, to reach.

To go back to the roots, one day, because as it is said in one of Roberto Benigni’s movies, “life is not perfect, it is not coherent, it is not easy, it is not eternal, but in spite of everything, life is beautiful”.

Former WP10

Corinna Martinella

Corinna’s backpack is full of dreams waiting to come true. The first of many? To finish writing her thesis. As soon as she defends it, she will close a chapter, a very special one.

Corinna first came to CERN in 2015 as a Technical Student. She had studied a Bachelor’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where she moved when she was nineteen. After that, as she wanted to focus on nuclear technologies, she decided to study a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering. Shorty after finishing it, she came back to CERN, this time as a Doctoral Student in Physics.

For five years now, Corinna has been a CERNie. Somehow, she still is. Even if she is not physically working there, her PhD is carried out in a collaboration between CERN, the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and ETH in Zurich, where Einstein and Mileva Marić also spent a chapter of their lives.

But Corinna already misses the people and, no doubt, the R1 which, every Friday, became the nerve center of CERN. It was a must-attend date, a holy place where the stress of the week was relieved by beers and good conversations (some of them with strangers, at least until then).

She fondly remembers playing volleyball there, lots of cheers! and a few farewell parties. Also, the CERN Photo Club sessions, where she learned to stop using the automatic mode. Corinna also joined the only women’s football team at CERN, Scrambled Leggs. It was not a winning team, but they enjoyed every game. Those moments will always be kept in her backpack.

In addition to growing a lot as a scientist, at CERN she became a person she did not imagine five years ago, but this did not come for free! Corinna found herself many times out of her comfort zone, facing situations that are not always as pleasant as we wish, but she did it and the feeling afterwards was very satisfying. That also makes us the person we are today.

She felt like a sponge absorbing lots of information from the people around her. Really smart people and women leaders who changed a lot her world view: unwittingly, they helped her to change and to design her own glasses with which to see reality.

Corinna is very passionate about what she does, as did Oriana Fallaci, the first female Italian war correspondent, world-renowned for her peculiar interviews. She used to say that wars were like madhouses, and those who were in them were their patients.

To Corinna, it is in the CERN’s purpose where beauty is hidden. Using science for peace, seeing how people from different cultures and religions (even from countries currently involved in armed conflicts) collaborate with the sole aim to discover what the universe is made of, and how it works. According to Fallaci’s simile, Corinna would be one of the madhouse’ psychiatrists.

People like her try to push the boundaries of the human knowledge farther and farther every day. She is sure that this is the miracle of research. In the words of Lise Meitner, the pioneering woman behind nuclear fission: “Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist”.

Corinna would love to use her knowledge and her technical skills for humanitarian purposes. She has always been interested in disarmament, specifically in nuclear disarmament. So, when she grows up, she would be happy actively working on this. That is why another one of the dreams she keeps in his backpack is to find, after her PhD, a postdoctoral project which will allow her to work on this topic.

Meanwhile? She wishes she had the time to travel around the world. Corinna, who was born in small town in the north of Italy close to the Swiss border, is a globetrotter, in whose mind there is something that has been going around for a long time: to take part in the Mongol Rally, a charity rally from Prague to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. There is no set route. Nor is there a fixed deadline. It is the magic of the adventure, with its contingencies and surprises. If 2021 allows it, this will be another dream come true for Corinna.

As Francesco Guccini sang, “un orizzonte insegue un orizzonte; a un’autostrada, un’altra seguirà”. A dream will follow a dream, one goal will chase another one. Because “gli spazi sono fatti per andare”, and Corinna will find in them her freedom. “La sua libertà”.

WP10

Rubén García Alía

Although he was born in Zaragoza, the childhood and adolescence passport of Rubén, an experimental physicist enthusiastic about learning and progress, embraces lots of stamps from both Atlantic’s shores. How to consider yourself belonging to a certain place if your nature of globetrotting?

Rubén was born the same year that Bruce Springsteen, a rock legend to whom his mother approached at an early age, won the Brit Award for International Solo Artist. He left the maños and the Ebro two years later to settle in the Spanish capital, but just for a couple of years. From the 4th to the 7th birthday, Rubén grew up in a paradise: San Diego, in California (USA), where he remembers taking baths on the beach every 31st of December, and the miniature train of Balboa Park. He came back to Madrid, the city that would end up becoming his usual intermittent destiny, and when he was 12 years old, Rubén’s family moved to Munich (Germany).

It was 1998 then, and, not so far from there, Ernst Jünger died. The German philosopher was invested doctor honoris causa by the Complutense University of Madrid, where Rubén, on his return to the capital, would study a degree in physics, although, emigrating in the last year to Rome (Italy) by the hand of a Erasmus scholarship. He came back to Madrid to do a master’s degree in nuclear physics and high energies and, a year later, in 2010, he gained momentum to jump again, this time to Leiden (Netherlands), where he began his professional career at the European Space Agency (ESA).

From there, a little bit like the main characters of Cien años de soledad, to whom “todas las cosas buenas que les ocurrieron en su larga vida”, derived from the change, Rubén arrived to Geneva, his most perennial destination. He has been for almost 9 years in the city of the watches and the international organizations.

Rubén works at CERN. He is part of the R2E (Radiation to Electronics), which seeks to identify and mitigate the failures caused by radiation, in the machinery of the LHC, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

For Rubén, beauty is defined by its practicality. Something is beautiful if it has objective characteristics that are useful or convenient. This experimental physicist opts for a beauty friendly to progress, willing to help us as individuals and as a society. The beautiful dwells in the Aristotelian virtue, in always going beyond.

He agrees with the Madrid poet, Dámaso Alonso, that the motor that drives the world is passion, it is placing heart in our actions. That is why, at the pace of Thunder road, Rubén dreams of continuity: the continuity of learning, of facing new challenges time and time again and, above all, the continuity of doing something that truly excites him.

Even if he was lame, Rubén would go earlier to the tavern of knowledge than to mass, because in life, as in the fictitious Macondo, “lo esencial es no perder la orientación” y Rubén knows where he wants to go.

WP8

Francisco Sánchez Galán

There are no big dreams, says Francisco laughing. He has always been closer to the “down-to-earth” ones club than to the dreamers party. That is why it is so difficult for him to imagine himself within 5 or 6 years, but there is no need to.

For him, beauty is the nature itself. It is the starry sky of Sagan’s Cosmos, it is “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” learning how to fly over a breathtaking sunset seen from the lighthouse of Mera, with A Coruña at the back.

Francisco was born there in 1969. He is not the typical Galician, he does not have morriña. He is not a fan of looking for how much he misses something. Of course, he misses his family, the pulpo a feira and zamburiñas,and the Atlanticosity in the lungs. But when he goes back to A Coruña, he misses a lot of things from Geneva and its surroundings. After a while, it is not only where you are born, it is also where you take roots.

Around 150 kilometers from his native town, he studied Mechanical Engineering at Vigo’s University. Just before finishing his studies, he saw a CERN advertisement: they were looking for technical students. It was the year 1996, and everything went so fast. Francisco applied in December, just two days before the deadline. He got an answer by mid January, and he had an interview in early February. A month later, he became a CERNie.

From 2003 to 2014, Francisco worked for ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a nuclear fusion research and engineering project which is building an experimental reactor in southern France. He returned to CERN as a Staff, and since then, Francisco is working mostly involved to HiLumi. Currently, he also is the Work Package 8 leader: a part of the project which takes care of the interface between the machine (HLC) and the experiments.

From his experience as a veteran CERNie, and because of his technical background, Francisco thinks that science people need failing. If someone does not allow you to let things drop from your hand when you are trying to find the balance, how would you learn?

He agrees with the timeless Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, who said that “el verdadero tesoro del hombre es el tesoro de sus errores”. Francisco feels that failing is the most natural and efficient way of learning. When you are a child, you touch everything, if it falls and it breaks, you do not care, you just take another one.

Being a child means not thinking about consequences. Once we grow up, we start thinking about them, sometimes because we know them, other times because people make us aware of them. Together with that, we lose part of that primitive learning, that trial and error processes.

That may be the reason why “cada maestrillo tiene su librillo”. Sometimes, we try to copy-paste the behaviours from others, but everyone has a way of doing things, a way of learning, a way of asking, a way of answering. And that is ok.

From a high degree of realism, Francisco would like to see HiLumi and ITER working or dark matter being discovered, why not? He will continue contributing with smooth improvements, applying his own recipes that may not work with anyone else.

Little by little, like “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” learned how to fly.

WP7

Daniel Wollmann

Only a few people have tasted the atmosphere of the CERN control center, or called control room in short. Daniel, an applied physicist who has been working at CERN for eleven years, knows it well. He has spent several nights shifts there, where “besides the experiment you are doing, you get to know the people who are with you well”, he ensures.

That may be the best of this assignment: all that work done and the close collaboration with the CERNies around you in that busy and intense space, which at night turns into a calm and grateful place.

Before becoming a CERNie in 2009, Daniel studied electrical engineering at the Dresden University of Technology (Germany), got into contact with accelerators at a very small accelerator in Singapore and ended up doing his PhD in physics at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT). Later on, he jumped to CERN, where he got a postdoc fellowship in LHC Collimation.

Now, he works in Machine Protection. His mission? To ensure that the LHC does not destroy itself. In other words, understand failure cases, protect the accelerator equipment against beam impact and keep the superconducting magnet circuits safe.

Even the life of a large accelerator is brittle. As the verses of Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright and poet, say, “Don’t let yourselves be deceived! / Life is precious little. / Gulp it in eager greed!”. To Daniel, because life in itself is too short, it will never fulfil us. Life can be fading very quickly.

This is related to a German proverb that he knows, and that comes out of the Bible, which is true for many German proverbs. It says: Der Mensch denkt Goot lenkt (Human beings plan thei lives, but God is in charge). To Daniel, we should do our best, e.g. when planning for the future, but there are a lot of things that we do not control. This releases the pressure to be in charge of everything.

Daniel’s dreams lean on two hands. On one of them, to help young scientists to find a purpose, to develop themselves, and to reach their full potential in science. On the other one, as a physicist, he drives to discover what our world is made of, describe it, and open new doors to make the world better.

This is what Daniel’s heart is burning for: helping others and making the world a better place, pieces of dreams that come together. It does not need a revolutionary discovery, but little steps can change the world. And, in fact, it has already begun with Daniel’s actions and plans.

At CERN, what is important for him is to keep focused, and that means that CERNies, as a team, unite behind the common vision, pulling in the same direction. Something that sometimes involves spending hours and hours in a control room.