Cambridge particle physicist is to be next director of ICTP
Fernando Quevedo of Cambridge University has been appointed as the new director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). He will succeed Katepalli Sreenivasan, who has led the institute since 2003 and will now be returning to the US to pursue his interests in research and teaching.
Quevedo is a well known theoretical particle physicist with wide-ranging research interests in string-theory phenomenology and cosmology. He was awarded the 1998 ICTP prize in recognition of his important contributions to superstring theory.
Born in Costa Rica, Quevedo received his early education in Guatemala. He obtained his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986 under the supervision of Steven Weinberg. Following research appointments at CERN, McGill University in Canada, the Institut de Physique in Neuchatel and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as a brief term as professor of physics at the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM), he joined the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge in 1998.
A Guatemalan national, Quevedo has received honorary doctorates from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and is the founder and co-ordinator of the International Network of Guatemalan Scientists.
The choice of Quevedo as the next director is in keeping with the spirit of ICTP – founded in 1964 by Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam – which is to do first-rate research while acting as the anchor for scientific capacity building in developing countries.
The Users' Office: 20 years and going strong
Twenty years ago, the same issue of CERN Courier that reported on the first collisions in the Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider also contained a short article on another new venture at CERN (CERN Courier September 1989 p24): in July 1989 an office was created to assist the growing number of "users" – the visiting physicists, engineers, technicians and students who come to CERN to work on the broad range of projects and collaborations. With the start-up of LEP, the expansive trend was clearly set to continue.
Since then the LHC experiments in particular have brought still further additions to the family of users, the total rising from 4500 to nearly 10,000 during the past 20 years. What's more, these users now come from a broader range of countries, with large representations from Russia and the US in particular. The office must help all of these users with any difficulties on a site that spans two countries, such as with their individual requirements for visas. As the CERN community has changed, so too have the surrounding nations, with the expansion of the EU and the introduction of the Schengen agreement on border controls. Before the inception of the Users' Office, it was common for users to spend a day or more wandering round CERN in search of the necessary documentation and information to make their stay official.
While the office has undergone various changes throughout its lifetime it has persisted in being a welcoming bridge to help settle the thousands of visitors from all around the world. It currently employs six multilingual staff to handle day-to-day operations – no more, in fact, than when it started in 1989. Users' registrations are limited to a maximum of two years, so with 10,000 users the team handles approximately 100 renewals and new registrations every week, as well as many requests for information and help from users and the experiment's secretariats. During peak periods such as July, when many students coming to CERN on the Summer Student Programme are registered as users, it is not uncommon to see long queues stretching out from the office.
In September, the office celebrated its 20-year anniversary with a drink offered to its various representatives of the user community, CERN management and staff members from the services with which the office is involved. These days, the office could not handle the needs of the many users without liaising with other services to provide a professional "welcoming" process at CERN.
• CERN users can find all that they need to know before coming to CERN at the Users' Office website: http://ph-dep-usersoffice.web.cern.ch/ph-dep-UsersOffice/.
Construction starts on new office space
With the LHC about to re-start, the new collider is continuing to attract more and more researchers, most of whom will come to CERN for some period. To ensure that the laboratory can cope with this influx, work has begun on a new block of offices. Building 42 will provide 300 additional workstations for researchers analysing LHC data, in addition to the 800 already available in the adjoining Building 40. With this building, CERN has gone "green". It will be more environmentally friendly than the older buildings, equipped with features such as a grass roof, enhanced insulation and automatic sun blinds.
The foundation stone was laid for the new building in a ceremony on 9 September in the presence of officials representing the Geneva State Council and the local Swiss community of Meyrin. At the ceremony, CERN director-general, Rolf Heuer, warmly thanked the Swiss Confederation, the Geneva State Council and the Fondation des immeubles pour les organisations internationales (FIPOI). The Swiss Confederation supported CERN's loan application to finance the construction of Building 42 via (FIPOI) and the Canton of Geneva provided the land.