CERN and Fermilab celebrate International Women's Day
The control rooms at CERN may have resounded to cheers for the first collisions of 3.5 TeV beams on 30 March, but earlier in the month they had witnessed a different kind of celebration. On 8 March both CERN and Fermilab chose to mark International Women's Day for the first time by honouring the past and current contributions of women at the two laboratories.
CERN encouraged its staff and users to enable as many women as possible to be on shift on the day in the control rooms of the experiments and accelerators, and to staff the IT helpdesk and guide official visits. Poster exhibitions also highlighted the presence of women scientists at the laboratory both now and in earlier decades. At Fermilab, women took the lead in certain control rooms and led special guided tours focusing on how women have contributed to the experimental facilities at the laboratory's intensity frontier.
At 15.30 CET a video conference linked the CMS Centre at CERN with the LHC Remote Operations Center at Fermilab for a live discussion about the contributions of women in physics. In this way, CERN's director-general, Rolf Heuer, and the co-ordinator for external relations, Felicitas Pauss, joined Fermilab's director, Pier Oddone, and deputy-director, Young-Kee Kim, for the celebrations, together with Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli, the spokespersons of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, respectively.
The idea for these celebrations began at CERN, with Pauline Gagnon from Indiana University, a scientist on the ATLAS experiment. Gagnon hopes that spotlighting women physicists at CERN will send an encouraging message to young women interested in science. In the experiments, in all of the departments and in the management, women are increasingly represented at CERN. In the CERN Control Centre, for example, half of the engineers in charge, who take responsibility for operating the LHC, are women.
At Fermilab, Women's Day formed part of a month-long Women's History Month celebration, during which weekly lunchtime discussions focused on the experiences of women during various decades at the laboratory.
• For more details about the event as well as video interviews with women at CERN discussing why celebrating International Women's Day is important to them, see http://cern.ch/womensday.
The JINR committee appoints Alexei Sissakian for a second five-year term
The Committee of Plenipotentiaries of the governments of the member states of the Joint Institute for Nuclear research (JINR) held a regular session in Dubna on 25–26 March. Discussions centred on the main outcomes of the institute's activities over the past seven-year period, together with plans of the JINR community for 2010–2016.
The main topics included the considerable progress in upgrading the Nuclotron-M/NICA accelerator complex, the DRIBs cyclotron complex, the IBR-2M reactor, the development of the IREN pulsed neutron source and the success of the JINR community in the synthesis of element 117. The successful development of partnership programmes with member states and with international and national scientific organizations was also discussed, in particular, the agreements concluded with CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab, the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, and the National Research Nuclear University (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). The session also considered further support of JINR's educational programmes, the implementation of a broad programme of innovation activities that take advantage of the special "Dubna" economic zone, and information about the establishment of the International Innovation Centre for Nanotechnology of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The election of the JINR director was also held at the session, which unanimously approved the appointment of Alexei Sissakian for a second five-year term. Well known in the fields of elementary particle physics, theoretical physics and mathematical physics, Sissakian is the author of fundamental papers on multiparticle production, approximation methods in quantum field theory, and the physics of strong interactions at high temperature and density. He is also the initiator of the NICA project based on the JINR accelerator complex for the studies of phase transitions and critical phenomena in nuclear matter (CERN Courier January/February 2010 p13).
Visit
Kasit Piromya, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Thailand, left, visited CERN on 3 March. During his visit he toured the LHC superconducting magnet test hall with Felicitas Pauss, CERN co-ordinator for external relations, right, and Frédérick Bordry, head of CERN's technology department. The minister also visited the ATLAS visitor centre.