Patricia McBride, distinguished scientist at Fermilab, has been elected as the next spokesperson of the CMS collaboration. She will take over from current spokesperson Luca Malgeri in the autumn, becoming the first woman to lead the 3000-strong collaboration.
McBride graduated in physics at Carnegie Mellon University, and completed a PhD at Yale analysing charm decays at Fermilab’s E630 experiment. After a postdoc at Harvard working on the Crystal Ball experiment at DESY and the L3 experiment at CERN, she joined Fermilab in 1994, later becoming head of its scientific computing programmes and head of the Particle Physics Division. Since joining CMS in 2005, she has served as deputy head of CMS Computing, head of the CMS Center at Fermilab and as US CMS Operations programme manager. She was deputy CMS spokesperson from 2018 to 2020.
It will be a challenging, but exciting time for the collaboration
Patricia McBride
Among other appointments, McBride was chair of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Particles and Fields, the US Liaison Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the IUPAP Commission for Particles and Fields. In 2009 she was elected as an APS fellow for her original contributions to flavour physics at LEP and the Tevatron, and for the development of major new initiatives in B physics and collider physics.
McBride’s love for particle physics started at the end of middle school when her mother gave her a book about particle accelerators. She will take up the leadership of CMS soon after LHC Run 3 gets under way, and is therefore looking forward to exciting times ahead: “CMS is looking forward to the Run-3 physics programme and at the same time will be pushing to keep the detector upgrades for the HL-LHC on track,” she says. “It will be a challenging, but exciting time for the collaboration.”
