Although sometimes it seems to us that everything has already been invented, this world still needs great inventors. Above all, women inventors who wish to improve our present. This is the dream of Heeral, a mechanical engineer who started working at CERN eight months ago.

“I want to be an inventor and  create better solutions for the world of tomorrow. We have damaged the planet to some extent and I want to have some effect on my surroundings”, she confesses. Because being an inventor in these times is like protesting, and Heeral is a tireless fighter.

She was born in Kanpur, a small city in the north of India, but has lived all her life in Mumbai, the big city of dreams. There, she did her degree in mechanical engineering, her first major achievement. “I had to go through a lot of opposition and resistance to pursue this engineering career”.

Heeral had always dreamed of being in the space industry, a path with many more thorns than roses. Society, its prejudices, old mentalities… All against the tide, but Heeral did not give up and she rebelled in her own way.

Very stealthily, without telling anyone, she began to apply for space engineering courses in Europe. She enrolled in the master’s degree in space science and technology in Kiruna (Sweden), where she did the first year. The second one was in Toulouse (France), on an Erasmus scholarship.

And the master’s thesis? She finished it last October at CERN, where she enjoys learning every day and being part of a work culture based on the willingness to help others. “Whenever I am stuck with something and I go to anyone in my vicinity and ask them about it, they take all the time they need to explain it to me in depth”, she says.

Now, for the first time in her life, Heeral has found the time to focus more on herself, and what she wants to do with her career. “All this time, I have just been going with the race, very rebellious and fighting with everybody to be where I am”.

Also now, from a distance, Heeral sees Mumbai as a philosophical entity. “After I left, I realized that the city can teach you a lot. No matter what country you go to and what cities you travel to, what I miss most about Mumbai is the activity and the energy”.

Let us remember that the current Mumbai metropolitan area is over 20 million people. “So you see life from a very different perspective. There, everyone is running to get to work on time, everyone is trying to make a living, everybody is going through the same struggle at the end of the day”, says Heeral.

Living as one in a country like India, with so many segregations in each and every sector of society, it is very difficult. In such a competitive environment, Heeral never had time to think much about her personal contributions to the world. Now, out of there and living her own dream, it is time.

The legendary Interstellar soundtrack is a good background music as you run for the bus, climb mountains or to send your morale through the roof. Perhaps also for moments of creativity, which for Heeral are synonymous with beauty.

The beauty with which this mechanical engineer sees everything. Even what is not yet in front of us. “The future for me is that I will invent some technologies in any field, which will help us to make a better life for tomorrow”, says Heeral.

And she will because she is unstoppable.

 

He was in Paris with his wife when, without knowing it, he sketched out the future. It was 2007 and this was one of his first trips abroad. Dmitry, a mechanical project engineer, told his wife, “it would be nice, one day, to come to Europe to work”.

She laughed then, but less than a year later, he was offered to join CERN. “It was a sudden opportunity. Something I did not expect because I had not even applied for any jobs”, he says. But as soon as he heard about the offer, the decision was made. He said yes.

Dmitry started to work on the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), an international project still in development. But twelve years is a long time and he has gone through several positions. He is now part of the HL-LHC project, specifically, of Work Package 13, which takes care of beam instrumentation.

He has two main roles. One is the engineering role, which involves all kinds of tasks related to manufacturing, design and purchasing. The second one is project coordination, where he is in charge of the communication because, as he explains, 90% of the project management is communication. And here comes his favourite part.

Dmitry enjoys that interaction, those pleasant collisions, with the CERNies around him. “I start my morning not by checking my emails, but by talking to people, asking them how their weekend went, how their families are doing… This is really what gives me the motivation for the whole day ahead”, he confesses.

In addition to a very diverse community, CERN also has cutting-edge technologies. Most of them are not to be found anywhere in the world, and that is very appealing for his more engineering side.

Although he has lived in this area for many years, Dmitry, who was born and raised in the Russian capital, still misses three things: family, friends and the cultural life. “I would say that Moscow never sleeps, but it does from time to time, although it is not a deep sleep. Every time you go out on the street, you can find cultural events, even at three in the morning”.

In both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, Dmitry graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU), on the banks of the Yauza, a tributary of the Moskva, the river that runs through the city. The city where Достоевский (Dostoevsky) was born, where Чехов (Chekhov) studied medicine and where Лев  Толстой (Lev Tolstoy) wrote most of his novels.

Instead of dreams, because these sometimes border on the impossible, Dmitry has distant plans. He would love to take a trip by car with his wife and friends from ocean to ocean. Perhaps from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Perhaps in the United States, from San Francisco to New York.

“When something that I had been planning, or that I had had in mind for a long time, such as coming to live in Europe, becomes a reality, I am very happy. It makes me feel that I am doing the right thing, that I have chosen the right path”.

Dmitry also likes to feel when something has been done from the heart. “When someone has invested all their skills, passion and professionalism in doing something, it will always look beautiful”. Whether it is a building, components for an accelerator or a road trip, for which time is much needed.

“Getting together at least three weeks, because a trip like this does not deserve to last less, is a difficult task, and that is why organizing plans for the future is complicated. Even more in our current situation”.

But, as the Russian poet Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova) wrote, “the future is known to cast its shadow long before it enters”. And “hope sings safely in the distance”.

The poet and philosopher George Santayana believed that pleasure is the central aesthetic category and beauty is nothing more than “pleasure seen as the quality of a thing”. If pleasure is relative, each of us will experience it differently.

There is a group of people who live in wonder at being able to describe and predict the behaviour of Nature using mathematical equations. These people are the physicists, and Thibaut is one of them.

He has been working as an accelerator physicist at CERN since January 2001. He thinks that those who observe and measure Nature have a need to love it, as well as the beauty it contains.

Almost twenty years have passed and the best of his work is still the “social collisions”. But, in addition to the interactions with others and the teamwork spirit, designing beam instruments, which is what Thibaut has been doing since he landed here, is something else he likes very much about his work.

Thibaut was born in Bordeaux, the port city in the south west of France that Odilon Redon and Albert Marquet painted, each in their own way. He studied physics there, then did his PhD at the CEA/CESTA (Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique / Centre d’Etudes  Scientifiques et Techniques, d’Aquitaine).

What he misses most from there (besides family and old friends) is undoubtedly the ocean. He grew up next to it and enjoyed going to the beach, swimming and surfing. “When you are at sea riding waves, you appreciate what the sea gives you and also what the freedom is in this case”, he believes.

Even with freedom, as with the temperature or the autumn rains, there are also different degrees. One of them (which may be one of the highest) is freedom by the sea. Like the one he felt every day when he was young.

Thibaut considers himself very lucky. He has no big dreams, perhaps just to do things better than today and thus be a better father, a better scientist and a better human.

As the French poet, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, wrote in Les Fleurs du mal, “homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer”. Thibaut will not only appreciate his own sea, but will try to appreciate it better every day.