How skills pursue diversity and inclusion

Students from under-represented populations, including those at institutions serving minorities, have traditionally faced barriers to participating in high-energy physics (HEP). These include a lack of research infrastructure and opportunities, insufficient mentoring, lack of support networks, and financial hardship, among many others.

To help overcome these barriers, in 2022 the US CMS collaboration designed a pilot programme called PURSUE – the Program for Undergraduate Research Summer Experience. Due to the COVID pandemic, the collaboration initially worked virtually with 16 students, before an in-person pilot was launched in 2023. The programme has changed the career paths of several students, and a third edition with 20 undergraduates is now underway.

The power of collaboration

Two thirds of the HEP workforce go on to develop careers outside the field. The skills developed in HEP can lead to careers in many sectors, from software and electronics to health and finance. With skills-based labour markets currently a hot topic in business, a more guided and organised approach towards skills has the potential to reinforce the workforce pipeline for both HEP and industry, and benefit the many young researchers who look for jobs outside of academia.

The LHC experiments are a perfect seedbed for this. Comprising some 1200 physicists, graduate students, engineers, technicians and computer scientists from 55 universities and institutes, the US CMS collaboration each year trains about 200 students, 100 postdocs and produces 45 PhDs. It is therefore in a strong position to provide pathways to involve many young researchers in every aspect of the experiment and to prepare hundreds of next-generation scientists for careers in physics and industry alike.

The PURSUE undergraduate internship offers opportunities in state-of-art detector design and upgrades, operations, novel techniques in data taking and analysis, scientific presentations and international partnerships. It doesn’t matter if you are a US citizen or not. The basic requirement is that you are a student inside the US. This year’s cohort comprises students from Africa, South and Central America, and Asia.

This one-of-its-kind programme relies on a large team of dedicated collaborators

At the start of each year, invitations are sent out to all US CMS institutes asking them to propose projects and mentors. This year almost 30 applications were received, which were then matched as closely as possible to the individual interests of the students. Being a diverse and sprawling collaboration – rather than a single institution – is an attractive part of the programme.

At the beginning of the internship, all students meet at the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab for two weeks of software training, during which they gain skills in Unix, Python, machine learning and other areas that will equip them in any research area and throughout industry. This part of PURSUE was developed within the framework of the IRIS-HEP project, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation to address the computing challenges of the High-Luminosity LHC, and the CERN-based HEP Software Foundation. These skills are also key requirements for industry, with 42% of companies identifying AI and big data as a strategic priority for the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023.

During the remaining eight weeks of their internship, students travel to the US institution where their mentor is located. The students stay connected throughout this period via meetings and Zoom talks on physics and careers topics, and at the end of the programme they come together to produce a final presentation and poster. Some continue their research during the following semester, enabling a deeper dive into the field.

Success story

This one-of-its-kind programme relies on a large team of dedicated collaborators who take precious time out of their routines to battle the lack of diversity in HEP. And PURSUE’s interns are already succeeding. For example, from the 2022 cohort, Sneha Dixit has been admitted to graduate school at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to pursue doctoral research on the CMS experiment, and Gabriel Soto has taken up a PhD in accelerator physics at the University of California Davis.

PURSUE also provides a way to engage new institutes with HEP. The initial funding for the programme was provided by a US Department of Energy grant awarded to Tougaloo College in Mississippi along with Brown University, the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Wisconsin. Tougaloo College had no previous connection to particle physics, but it is now hoped that it will become a member of the US CMS collaboration.

The driving force behind PURSUE was Meenakshi Narain of Brown University, an inspirational leader and champion of diversity in CMS and beyond, who passed away in January last year. We hope that the programme inspires similar initiatives in other experiments, fields and regions.