World’s largest physics lab celebrates women in physics

Every control room in the world’s largest physics laboratory, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will be staffed by women today in celebration of International Women’s Day.

The idea for this celebration was proposed by IU scientist Pauline Gagnon.
The laboratories will have live images of control rooms and video clips of the women speaking about the event.

“What we really want to accomplish is to give a positive image, to say to the young girls that they can do physics.

The more women there are, the more natural it becomes to have women around and in important positions,” said scientist and event coordinator Chiara Mariotti in an IU press release.

According to CERN’s records, women are 21.3 percent of ATLAS physicists younger than age 50.

“At CERN, and in particle physics the world over, talent is the only criterion that counts,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer in the release.

Gagnon, the founder of ATLAS Women’s Network, is a senior research scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Physics and is coordinating the celebration. She is a part of a team of scientists from IU that work on the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

The experiment is searching for new discoveries about the basic forces that have shaped the universe over time such as the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space and evidence for dark matter.

CERN is near Geneva, Switzerland, and known as the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

To view the control rooms live, visit: www.cern.ch/internationalwomensday.

— MJ Slaby