From the desk of the CB Chairperson

Dear friends,

The CMS Collaboration Board (CB) is pleased to present the inaugural issue of the CB newsletter. The CB is the parliament of CMS, and is at the heart of our wonderful experiment. The CB is best known to many of you as the body that elects the Spokesperson; it also works hand in hand with the Spokesperson and his/her team on a daily basis to further the scientific mission of CMS and to build an ever more nearly perfect Collaboration to execute it.

The next two years present many opportunities. Foremost among them are the timely and thorough completion of the analysis of the 7 and 8 TeV data, the preparations that will ensure a well-staffed and efficient turn on at 14 Tev in 2015, the continued development of the Phase 1 and Phase 2 upgrades, expanding the education, training and career development of the young, enhancing communication and outreach, and facilitating and enhancing the participation of every member in the experiment.

The year 2012 was a remarkable time for particle physics. Ten years from now we will look back and realise how fortunate and privileged we were to have been part of CMS in that period. CMS will benefit if we all continue to embrace “the spirit of 2012”; it remains a privilege to be part of CMS, and there are multiple reasons to be optimistic that many new discoveries await us.

We hope this newsletter will keep you informed of the work of the CB. We would love to hear from every member of the Collaboration. You may reach us by e-mail at cms-cbchairteam@cern.ch or by stopping by the CB Office: 40-2-B28. On Skype we are ian.shipsey, claudia-elisabeth.wulz and jorgen.dhondt

Best regards,
Ian, Claudia and Jorgen

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Next Meeting of the CB

The next Collaboration Board meeting, the 87th, will take place on the afternoon of 22 February 2013 during the Physics Week. Some items on the agenda are:

  • ESP: a proposal for 2013 that introduces important changes to the ESP system
  • Formation of a group to develop proposals for authorship of CMS papers
  • The CMS Data Analysis School, including a report from Hamburg and the creation of a group that would address such items as CMS student and post-doc fellowships to attend CMSDAS
  • A proposal to create a Young Scientist Committee in CMS as well as a list of proposals from the Career Committee including plenary memorial lectures, recurrent job information, the history of coordination positions, the profile of an experimental particle physicist, …
  • Launch of the CMS PhD survey
  • Call for a new chairperson and members of the CMS Thesis Committee

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Collaboration Board Chairperson Ian Shipsey (centre) and Spokesperson Joe Incandela (second from right) along with their respective deputies (from left to right) Jorgen D'Hondt (CB Secretary), Claudia-Elisabeth Wulz (CB Deputy Chair), Tiziano Camporesi and Joao Varela.

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Ian Shipsey
CB Chairperson

Ian joined CMS in 2001. He was a Forward Pixel manager coordinating the production of the forward silicon sensor modules by a team of 14 undergraduate and graduate students at Purdue. In 2010 he was the Quarkonia Working Group co-Convener, producing the first measurement of the Upsilon production cross section at the LHC and the eye-catching plot that simultaneously shows many Standard Model particles, from the eta to the Z. In 2011-12 the team, with Heavy Ion colleagues, observed sequential Upsilon suppression in heavy-ion collisions, regarded by many as a smoking gun for the Quark Gluon Plasma. Recently Ian’s group has joined colleagues from RAL and Princeton to search for new physics through the detection of long-lived particles, and is executing the cross-check analysis of Bs→μμ. During 2009-'12 Ian was co-coordinator of the LHC Physics Center (LPC) at FNAL where he co-developed the CMS Data Analysis School (CMSDAS) and the CMS Fellows programme that supports more than 20 post-docs and young faculty annually. He has been ARC Chair for a variety of Higgs, electroweak, beauty and quarkonia analyses.

After a PhD from Edinburgh for studies of CP violation in the kaon system with NA31 at CERN, he joined the CLEO experiment at Cornell. He led the fabrication of the CLEO II muon detection system and the CLEO III SVX, and made precision measurements of Vcb, Vub, Vcs and Vcd. In 2000 Ian was one of the leaders of a group who proposed and designed a new experiment, CLEO-c, to test Lattice Gauge Theory calculations and search for new physics with charm. He was co-Spokesperson of CLEO III and CLEO-c (2001-04). He is Julian Schwinger Professor at Purdue, a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is currently a member of ICFA, the Board of overseers of FermiLab, The SLAC Policy Committee, the Argonne National Lab Physical Sciences Advisory Group, and the Board of Directors of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation. He is the Chair-elect of the APS Division of Particles (DPF) and is co-Chair the DPF Coordinating Panel on Advanced Detectors. He has mentored 12 PhD students and 10 postdoctoral fellows. Ian loves to teach, and has received Purdue’s highest award for teaching and is extensively involved in public outreach, especially for CMS. He is profoundly deaf and has given over sixty colloquia and talks to the public on hearing, cochlear implants and perception since 2003. He is in awe of CMS and his CMS colleagues, his wife Daniela Bortoletto (also on CMS) and his twenty-year old daughter who is training to be a opera singer.

 

Claudia-Elisabeth Wulz
Deputy Chairperson

Claudia studied physics at the Vienna University of Technology and started her career at the UA1 experiment in 1982 as a summer student. Later she obtained a CERN fellowship, under the leadership of Carlo Rubbia. Employed by the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she worked briefly on the electromagnetic calorimeter of the NA48 experiment, before becoming leader of the emerging Austrian CMS group. She contributed to the design of the trigger system. In particular, she proposed new ideas for the Level-1 Global Trigger and initiated the development of the Trigger Supervisor. She has been deputy Trigger Project Manager and Institution Board Chair for TRIDAS. On the physics side she has performed studies for new heavy vector bosons and is participating in searches for supersymmetry and exotica.

Claudia has been a member of most CMS committees. She was Chair of the Conference Committee, Regional Representative for Other CERN Member States in the Management Board, a member of the Authorship Board and the Advisory Board to the Collaboration Board. Currently she is a member of the Publications Committee in the field of exotica, and of the Thesis Award Committee. She also lectures as an Adjunct Professor in Vienna and is the Austrian representative in RECFA, the restriced European Committee for Future Accelerators. She enjoys outreach activities and was elected among the leading women in science and technology by two Austrian magazines. Claudia is also a licensed radio amateur and plays the cello and the piano.

 

Jorgen D'Hondt
Secretary

After research on W bosons with the ALEPH and DELPHI experiments at LEP, Jorgen joined CMS in 2003 through the Silicon Tracker project. Together with a team of technicians and engineers, he has worked on hundreds of qualified Tracker Endcap modules. At the same time he initiated studies on vertex and jet reconstruction, leading to novel analyses in top quark physics. During the years 2007 and 2008 he became the first top-quark convener within the CMS Collaboration, whereafter he became CMS team leader at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. From 2011 he is the director of the VUB part of the Inter-university Institute for High Energies in Brussels, where he also initiated a new research team on LHC phenomenology. Today the institute embraces about 80 members. At the faculty he is chairing the Physics Department.

His current interests are in the search for new physics connected to top-quark processes and supersymmetry, as well as in the upgrade project for the CMS Tracker. In 2011 he was one of the two main organisers of the CMS week in Brussels. Jorgen is the Belgian representative in RECFA, the restricted European Committee for Future Accelerators, as well as in IPPOG, the International Particle Physics Outreach Group. In CMS he chaired numerous ARC's and was promotor of two Thesis Award winners.

Although physics is a passion for Jorgen, when he is creative in his well-equipped kitchen he enjoys a good glass of wine, with a preference for the Merlot grape. He lives in the countryside in Belgium where he has installed a painting atelier in his house. You can find him there when he is not lost among a vast series of books or playing with his two year old daughter in his garden.

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