STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, United Kingdom
I enjoy skiing and sailing, but it’s been two years since I became a dad and that’s my favorite ‘sport’ now. That’s all I can do and want to do in my spare time. I was at CERN during the Higgs discovery. I worked on CMS, one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Now I’m working on DUNE and its data acquisition system. On one end, you have the particle detectors and electronics that produce digital data. On the other end, you have the data storage. What is in the middle is the data acquisition system. It takes in all the digitized data, packages it, and hands it to storage. We have the mission to prepare the DAQ for catching all the data from a supernova, which could happen any time. At the LHC, you can switch off the particle accelerator beam and the detectors and fix things. But our detector always has to be on. We don’t know when the neutrinos from a supernova will arrive. The beam from the universe doesn’t stop.