CERN, Switzerland
When I graduated, the one thing I didn’t want to do was work with computers – and that is what I’ve built my whole career on! I was doing my Master’s thesis in Italy on a smaller experiment, and I met a professor that offered me a PhD position in Switzerland. His team had just joined the ATLAS trigger and data acquisition project, and he arranged for me to be based at CERN, where many experts were working on that topic. I integrated with the CERN group, thinking I would do hardware and electronics, but was assigned a software task. With time I learned that, provided there is a challenging problem, every job has interesting aspects, and so I progressively became a data acquisition and software expert.
Now I’m the consortium lead for the data acquisition system of DUNE. Something I like about DUNE is the variety of fronts I can work on. The prototype detector, ProtoDUNE, required fast development and lots of hands-on work. The design of a complex and large data acquisition system, which will be needed for the final experiment, is intellectually and technically challenging. The managerial and leadership aspects related to my role are very interesting and demand a whole set of different skills. Over the years I’ve discovered that, after all, what I like most is working with other people. People always manage to surprise me. I’ve evolved from being the student to the postdoc to the team leader and I’ve seen it from different perspectives. I think it is very nice to see how different people reason about a problem and put together their different approaches to solve it.