hey everyone how you doing it's me it's
Clara i'm back
with another one of my science chats so
in these videos i am chatting to my
friends
who are awesome scientists or engineers
or
mathematicians and we're going to find
out a little bit about what they do
where they work how
you know how the work environment is for
them and maybe to
chat a little bit about equity as well.
So today i'm really excited i've got
Dr Clara Nellist
who is a particular physicist at
CERN on the ATLAS project so that's
that's super exciting
anyone that's been sort of looking at
my
videos on how what we use
superconductors for
and i actually talk a little bit about
particle acceleration and i talk about
how
we use superconductors to bend the
magnet uh,
to create magnetic fields for making
sure that our particles
crash into each other at the right
place basically and so
Clara is actually working on that
kind of stuff so that's great.
so before we start Clara's got a
YouTube channel and you know
she's on the socials and stuff so uh
check down below
for her links give her a like and a
follow
and of course like subscribe share this
video if you enjoy it and with that we
will
move over to the video.
yeah hi
i'm Clara i am a particle physicist
working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN
and i study all particles and how they
interact with each other to try and
understand
what the universe is built out of.
that's really succinct that's awesome
and
also like say we know each other through
some of this sort of outreach and the
diversity and inclusion work so tell us
a little overview and we'll
come back to that later but a little
overview of the stuff that you're
involved
in yeah i guess to also try and keep it
succinct
as i was progressing through physics
i noticed of course that
that there's a lack of diversity and
initially i was looking at
women in physics and so i wanted to
encourage more women in physics and as
i have progressed through my career i've
noticed that it's not just about getting
people
into physics but it's creating an
environment where everybody can thrive
and really
flourish with their research so it's
also about keeping people in physics and
it's and
now I've broadened out and
understanding the different
diversity that we need to include in
in science.
that's wicked yeah that's yeah something
i was talking about with Andrew it's
really nice that
you know i started out looking at sort
of LGBTI+ in
in STEM and maybe working class in STEM
and it's
it's broadened out and actually
i like the fact that we are being more
sort of intersectional because
it means we're not just trying to
improve things for one group we're
trying to improve things for everyone
and you know it means that well
intersectional people exist as well so, yeah
and it's a fight that we 
that we're stronger if we work together
so we shouldn't just be focusing on
my area or you know this one area but if
we
if we work together and make a really
substantial change then
everybody can can benefit from it
completely agree
completely agree but this is this is why
we're all friends
i think we're in many ways on the same
page and yet we're not scared to call
out each other and say no this is
i have a different viewpoint it's nice
that we're able to actually sort of
criticize and
make each other think and we're all
willing to listen which is really cool
as well so
but i will i'll i'll come back to the 
the science first of all so i noticed
your background
is that from where you work per se
yeah so this is the large hadron
collider at CERN
so this is part of the 
experimental setup that we have
um so it's a 27 kilometer long tunnel so
if i went that way
for 27 kilometers i would end up back in
the same spot
okay so it seems like a good, a good
workout and
yeah i really want to run it but they
don't let you i'm busy because it's
quite a sensitive
environment but i'd love to do a 27
kilometer race
through the tunnel
yeah i understand why
they don't but also
yeah they should
yeah i think that's a
virtual
uh video going through the whole tunnel
but i'd have to dig it out
wow yeah i i should point out i i could
not manage
27k uh 27 was it 27 kilometers or miles
yeah it's kilometers yeah so a little
over half a marathon
yeah and a few years ago i was like you
know what i'm gonna
get myself to the point where i can run
a half marathon and i was doing 10ks but
then
my knees unfortunately won't let me run
anymore so
it is what it is so i'm much better
hanging off rock faces and climbing
instead so anyway
oh and like say i get sidetracked a lot
so i apologize in advance
um so yes so you you work at CERN how
long have you been there
and you talked about the ATLAS project
so
what does that do within the sort of
projects at CERN
yeah so i have been working on
experiments at CERN for
over 10 years now but always with the
ATLAS
collaboration the ATLAS experiment so
along the LHC
tunnel we have four major detectors and
that have
slightly different goals in the research
and two of them ATLAS and CMS
are looking for we say it's general
physics and so we
we collide protons together at the
center of our detectors
um and then we measure everything that
comes off of them and tried to recreate
uh what was there at the center so it
could have been a higgs boson it could
be
many of the standard model particles
that we know of or it could be something
new so it could be dark matter it could
be other
kinds of physics and i i started
so my PhD is actually working on the
detector itself so i
started upgrading the detector
so the very heart of the ATLAS
detector is made out of pixels
and my PhD was on developing new
pixels so that we could
take even better data and now i work
more on the analysis side
so studying the different particles
in the collisions that we produce
oh that's fantastic i hadn't realized
you'd been working on it so long i
wasn't sure
because some people obviously you know
i've been in my current group
five years and i was in all different
groups before that so you've been you've
been on the project
sometime now.
yeah so i've moved to
different
universities so i started at the
University of Manchester
and since then i've had different
postdocs but it's always with the same
collaboration so it's
it's kind of strange because you change
countries you change labs you change
groups 
but actually the work you're doing can
be either exactly the same or very
similar
so it's kind of nice to still have
that continuity
yeah i find the same thing i worked in a
lot of labs and every so often i'll be
like i'll just get this oh no that was a
different lab i don't know
yeah i know that that's that's really
interesting
and it it's fun to i don't know i like
moving around it's good
so does that mean a lot of the stuff
that you do you
do you spend a lot of time because
you've been in different universities
and do you spend a lot of time on site
at CERN
or do you do a lot of offline work as
well
how does that work?
so it's a bit of a
mix when i was doing a lot of hardware
work i really needed to be
in the lab that i was with because we
had
clean room facilities where we would
test our detectors
in-house and then we would spend a
lot
of time either at CERN or at DAISY which
is in Germany
which is another particle accelerator
lab where we could
do the actual tests within the beam
conditions with our detectors
so as a phd student i was based at CERN
for a full year which was really
great to
to meet people and to get integrated
into the community
and then since then i've spent a lot
of time going back and forth so i spend
say
about a third of my time at CERN and the
rest of the time in the lab
or the university.
oh that's cool that's
cool
where's it where's DAISY?
so DAISY's
in Hamburg so just on the outside
of the city
ah okay uh i've only traveled through
hamburg airport i think that's yeah so
okay cool
and so um so where are you now what
where are you based now and i realize
this is a
leading question because you're sort of
in between
right
well so i'm still with the same so i'm
i'm currently in Nijmegen
in the Netherlands so this is where my
university is i'm with the Radboud University
and also with Nikhef which is the
Dutch
high energy physics funding and
so i'm still going to be with them but
i'm moving to CERN to be based there
for a while so yeah kind of in
between locations.
Fantastic that's great so i
i'm fascinated about CERN and i've got a
little bit of an idea and
and but my first degree wasn't physics
so i'm always sort of
you know i think we were talking about
this recently i was trying to double
check that some of my stuff was right.
Yeah, i mean even within CERN
though i mean i have to do this too
so it's such a huge facility and there's
so much going on that
we can become experts in this one thing
and then something else happening
in the accelerator research or
on one of the other experiments i have
to go and ask people
to explain that to me or we have a just
discussion about it so
it's very common there's so much going
on that you can't possibly know
everything to be honest. 
And it's a i mean it's a big facility
but uh yeah so i've worked with people
and that work with you know making the
superconductors
obviously being in the Center for
Superconductivity at Oxford and we've
i've worked with people that are
involved in making different coatings
for the inside
of the of the tubes and stuff like that
so i've worked with sort of the
materials
thin films groups and it's really
cool and really interesting and
it's amazing just how, i mean, CERN is
such a massive facility
obviously like you said 27 kilometers
is it a big campus is there campuses in
different countries at that stage or?
 
yeah so actually we have two main
campuses um so we have the main one
which is in Switzerland
although within that you can cross into
France
and back into Switzerland again without
leaving the campus
so we have a little stone that says
when you're going into
into France and then we have another
campus that's actually just in France
which is where for example the
control center
for the large hadron collider is so a
lot of the accelerator physicists are
based
on that site and then a lot of the
detector people are based on the mayor
insight which is in Switzerland
that's so cool i love the fact that it's
like oh i'm in another country i hadn't
realized where i'd wandered that's um
that's really cool i love that
and people forget when they go to the other
site and
there's a restaurant there that you have
to pay in Euros whereas on the
on the main site you pay in Swiss Francs.
 
of course
so you you can pay in other currency but
sometimes the exchange rate isn't so
good
so you want to pay in the correct
currency for the country you're in
 
yeah yeah yeah and i know and
having been a postdoc in Switzerland for
four years is the canteen in
Switzerland about five times as
expensive as the one on the French side
it's the the good thing about CERN is
that even though it seems expensive when
you get there from somewhere else if you
then go and eat in Geneva
it's it's actually quite reasonable 
the cost compared to eating in town
and so it's a bit more expensive than
the French side but it's not
a massive difference because they can't
they try and keep it reasonable for
people
yeah we actually and i was doing some
experiments we got a short-term project
from an EU
COST action to allow a professor from
Belgium to come and work with me in
Zurich
and they have a very set
amount that you can for sort of daily
living
and that wasn't even half the cost of
the cheapest hotel we could find
so they ended up um crashing in my spare
room for a couple of weeks instead but
yeah
but that's by the by
cool so what is it you're you're doing
on a day-to-day basis how often are
experiments running how often are you
smashing things into other things?
is that a rare occurrence? 
 
For my work or just in general?
general
how much do you smash stuff? up that's a
great comment
my favorite comic, there's a great comic
that has
it says if biologists did their
research like
the LHC or like CERN and they just
smashed two frogs into each other
and try and look at all the pieces 
which i don't recommend doing because
it's not very nice to frogs but i
thought it was quite funny
um yeah so day to day i'm 
doing analysis work now and so we're
so we're not currently running at CERN
we're in what's called a shutdown period
which is a scheduled block of time
for about one or two years
where we warm up the accelerator open
up all the cabins
and we install our upgrades we do
repairs we
maybe improve, yeah, so the accelerator
if we want to move to a higher energy it
also needs to be trained the magnets
and so all of this happens during the
shutdown
and so during that period we're not for
example
doing shifts in the control room we're
not monitoring the detectors. but
we're still
analyzing the data that we've taken
before and so we have a huge chunk of
data
that we're sifting through to try and
do precision measurements, to try and
find new particles, to
yeah do all of the studies that we want
to do ready so that when we take more
data
starting next year then then yeah we're
ready to
to add to the data we've already got
yeah that's really cool it's ironic that
you mentioned frogs. i just
chatted with Andrew Princep and he
was talking about levitating frogs.
Go figure.
 
We don't levitate any frogs.
yeah so
so day to day i'm doing a lot of coding
so a lot of 
writing scripts to search through the
data to select
events that we're interested in and
also i'm starting to do more machine
learning work
so writing algorithms to select for
me
because there's so much that we have to
consider
so all the different 
all the different features of the event
that we could say:
okay i want one electron rather than two
electrons and that will look at
a certain set of data for us we can
teach machine learning algorithms to do
that in a more
intelligent way. in a more
powerful way.
so you're not just using a
microscope and you know looking really
hard
that is a joke of course
 
although we do sometimes say that the
LHC is like
a huge microscope because it's
really looking at things on a tiny scale
so we don't
look with our eyes but we often use
the analogy that it is like a
a huge microscope 
 
funnily enough as i
was saying it i was i was actually
wondering that because that's
effectively what you're doing
i mean you are, like you say, looking at
very small things or
well very very small things in fact but
yeah and
there's a lot of crossover with some of
the work that i do
but obviously it's a very different
scale and the idea of a two-year
shutdown for maintenance 
i can imagine that the researchers in my
lab would 
not be so happy if i said that we had...
"i'm just gonna do some quick maintenance
the system will be up and running
again in two years" i mean most
research positions might not even be
that long
 
yeah so we have a page that tells you
the status of the LHC
and i like so at the end of the last
shutdown they usually write
so sometimes we have shutdowns for
say a day
but that's not shutting down the whole
of the LHC it's it's not doing
collisions for
physics analysis but the accelerated
physicist might want to do some beam
studies for example
and so they'll put a little note on this
page you know shut down for beam studies
or whatever
and at the end of the last set of run
they said
they wrote shut down for intervention.
estimated time two years
so wow yeah yeah i don't know
i mean a different bit of kit but i was
at Culham in the UK, at JET
looking at their fusion generator and i
was there
when they were trying to get it ready to
turn back on after a long time and
actually the next time i was there
they just fired it up like the day or so
before
i was there doing some trans awareness
and i got to see them
firing up JET which was pretty cool that
does sound very cool i would love to see
that
yeah yeah i don't think i was supposed
to be there but they're like yeah
whatever
i'll be fine so um i love it and i'm
also getting to learn all this
different stuff as well which is
fascinating.
so you said that you're...
basically particles are being
smashed into each other. not frogs,
particles.
and then you're measuring them so
how are you smashing the particles and
how are you measuring them and i
realized that that is
a lot of information so feel free to
talk about
the in whatever depth you feel happy
doing.
 
yeah so uh we we have the protons in the
accelerator
and the accelerator physicists
work on making the bunch of protons
really dense
together because that means that when
when each beam
crosses each other you want the
chance of there to be an interaction to
be very high
and so the denser the the proton bunch
we call it
the more likely you'll get a
collision and so that's what they
they work on and they also work on
making sure like the crossing angle
is is right to increase
the chance of collision. so
they yeah they accelerate the protons to
very nearly the speed of light we get
them up to what's called
13 TeV. that's a tera
electron volt and it's the
center of mass energy over the collision
and then using Enstein's equation
E=mc squared so we know that matter
can be converted into energy and then
back into matter again
and so we, yeah, we take the matter and
the energy from
the protons they collide together
and from that something, a new particle
is created
so the the the rate of the particles
being created
depends on what you're colliding
the energy that they're colliding at
so we can predict all of this and
then
a lot of these particles are not very
stable so for example the higgs boson
doesn't hang around.
it doesn't it's not a stable particle
so it will change into
lighter particles from the standard
model or perhaps
outside the standard model which would
be wonderful
and then these lighter particles travel
out in sort of a firework shape.
it's not a firework but that's kind
of the spray that it comes out as
and as they travel through different
parts of our detector
which are specialized for identifying
and measuring the properties of
different particles
it's then like a fingerprint we can say
okay we had these types of particles in
this
section of the detector and they had
this energy and we add it all back
together
and we can say okay there was probably a
higgs boson there
so we can never say for certain what was
in the center, but we can
we can predict
from what we measure and we do this
billions of times
and then we put it together in these
fancy plots
and we say okay there. so for the higgs
discovery for example
we looked at you can look at the rate of
two photons coming out of the
detector and this happens for lots of
different types of events and so you get
a nice falling
graph as you increase the the energy of
the two photons
and then you get a little bump at 125
GEV
once you collect enough data and from
that bump you can say there was a
particle
that decaying into those two photons
it had a mass of 125 GEV
none of our other particles have a mass
of 125 GEV so it's a new particle
and so that's one of the ways that we we
discover new particles in our data.
 
wow
that's so cool it's i mean and like you
say
it's i mean it's a lot of energy so i
tried to
do a very basic overview of it in a
video that
should be going out fairly soon actually
on my channel which you kindly looked
over and corrected but
it is, it's so complicated there's so
much different stuff going on and so
many different theories that it's
and especially not coming from a physics
background for me it was like...
it was it was a learning curve
yeah
but i will say the one of the
misconceptions we sometimes get at CERN
is that it's only physicists
that are working there but we really
have a massive team of engineers
computer scientists
material scientists and then that's also
to mention
we have lawyers and 
human resources staff and translators
and so CERN is tens of thousands
of people
and we really need everybody to come
together to make this happen so
the person who gets to make that final
plot and say i found the particle gets
you know a lot of the credit often but
really there's such a massive team
behind
the whole endeavor and i'm sure i've
missed groups out so... oh yeah we have
firefighters
at Cern. and we have a dedicated fire
fighting team
just so that we don't set anything on
fire or if we do they come and stop it
yeah actually when i was when i was
doing my postdoc
in in Switzerland i my 
lab my office partners, my office mates
dad was one of the health and safety
inspectors at CERN so
kind of he was his dad was part of one
you know one of the parts of the cogs
in that machine and we were talking
about it before because
yeah i was talking about with usually i
work with material scientists and even
within the material scientists there's
the coating groups and there's the
superconducting group and there's
there's so many of those there's so many
different people
um it's
it's quite remarkable just how many
people are there and
and how much effort goes into making the
experiments work
yes um which is why i think i don't know
if
any of our viewers have looked but you
know when you've got a paper there's
like two pages of people
listed on there but
it's because there is so much involved
and so much going on
so yeah so just quickly the example that
i gave with the higgs to two photons
so it's not you also have to do a lot of
calibration and
understanding. for example, are you
measuring the photons correctly and are
your detectors working well and
yeah how do you read out the data are
you collecting the right amount of data
how do you store it
so all of these questions have to be
answered well
before you can make that final study and
that's why there's so many teams
and so everybody in the collaboration
who's done
any contribution to the to the
collaboration then gets to have their
name on
every future paper because you really
can't say that just one team
made that measurement it's such a huge
team effort
 
yeah absolutely and like i mean it's
like such a large
piece of kit, so of course you...
it needs a lot of people 
you know i'm all well and good
maintaining a few vacuum chambers in my
lab
but, i mean, your vacuum chamber is on
a
literally another scale
 
yeah i think i think don't we have it's
a bigger vacuum than outer space
you think? i don't know i know it's
colder than than outer space
at the LHC i'd have to double check the
vacuum but it's a very
it has to be a very good vacuum because
any any sort of stray particles
or dust that's in the accelerator can
could degrade the measurement.
yeah
absolutely we
so my equipments are just sort of high
vacuum or ultra high vacuum and then
you've got space and i think
you're, yeah ... i can't even imagine
the size of the vacuum pumps or the type
of vacuum pumps you've got working at
at the LHC. i've not actually had a look
around so...
oh you have to come visit
yeah. believe it or not, I've even...
so i streamed a video that was
talking about sort of LGBTI in STEM and
that has been streamed to
a group in CERN. and i've worked with so
many different people. i've even lived in
the same country, 
well, half the same country
and i've still not managed to uh...
Yeah, but you're in the German speaking part
right
yeah
yeah it's very very different part
of the country
 
it's amazing how different Switzerland
is across,
um across, its relatively small length
and breadth it's it's
quite amazing but I did have a
nice time there though
and it is beautiful being surrounded by
uh mountains. Oxford's far too
flat for my liking someone that climbs
and hikes
yeah
 i like a bit of mountain
so the
one question that sort of occurs to
me and this is probably a really basic
question
but i'm putting you on the spot so maybe
it's not um so you're sending these
particles around the system and like you
said it's 26 kilo...
27 kilometers long so how long does it
take them to
to do a rotation uh so the frequency,
uh, that's a good question! we collide
bunches 11 000 times per second
but that's not necessarily because...
we have a whole train that's
in the beam
 it's, uh
say a tenth of a thousandth of a second
did i say that correctly it's very very
quick 
yeah that's
that's incredible and do they,
when i was doing my animations i had
them going round and round and round do
they go around
a few times or do they go around
well so it's 11 000 times a second so if
you say if you had one bunch
uh yeah i'd have to check the numbers
completely but
so but then we have the
beam in the LHC for hours and so i think
the there's there is a record of the LHC which i think is over a day of having
been circulating
in the in the collider so it's it's
billions of times that they will, or more, go around the
accelerator and really, really we
eventually would just get rid of the
beam and start again. 
not because we can't keep it in the
accelerator but because
when they collide it reduces the number
of protons that we have
and it's more complicated to try and top
that up
than to just get rid of
all of it and then to feed in a whole
fresh bunch of protons
that's so cool. i just i love it and i
mean i'm sure all those particles are
getting really really dizzy going around
there
ironically i've just been looking into
spin so
um there's sort of a little bit more to
that
but yeah sorry
i got completely sidetracked there um
my own silly mind has just gone sort of
um
spinning off so i'm
trying to trying to refocus and think
of something intelligent to say
so is that um...
so you're collecting an awful lot of
data and like you say it takes you years
and years to go through this data i mean
you must have i can imagine
the computers the, the storage and those
things must be
huge i mean there must be an intense
amount of data
yeah so we we have our own dedicated
data center
but then we also have copies that are
distributed all over the world
A,  for backup and B, so that people
can access them
from anywhere access the data
 
that's really, really
cool i'm gonna
i'm gonna ask a question that possibly
sounds a little bit flippant
and i always sort of hate this
question but it's interesting
why? why are we doing it? what's the point
why are you doing it?
good question
i do it because i'm curious and i think
that
part of the human endeavor should be
to understand
our surroundings and what we're
made of and how
everything interacts with each other
i want to live in a society where we
value this and where we
we progress towards it 
but also, i mean, so the primary reason is
is curiosity it's just purely because i
want to know
how everything works together but it's
nice that there
are benefits that come from it there
there's technology that is developed i
mean
at CERN we're doing things that have
absolutely never been done before
and we have to invent new technology
and methods to be able to do it and
because we're publicly funded from
countries all over the world
everything we do is open open source
so all of our papers are open access
anything that's
invented is just there for people to use
um so touch screens were invented at
CERN
the Web is one that we can commonly talk
about is PET scanners are, i don't think they were
invented at CERN but they
were the technology that we use have
benefited
PET scanners, so proton emission
tomography scanners
so i also like that the research that
we're doing feeds into this sort of
open
culture of knowledge and access to
technology
so that's why i do
 
now that's a really good point and
on one side it's important to know
because those discoveries will help us
understand
other materials or the properties down
the line
and so that nothing...
there's no science that is completely
isolated
like even if you're looking at materials
that people aren't specifically
interested in at the time
there's something's going to come from
it but 
yeah
it's a really really good point that you
made about, 
you know, the technology we don't think
because we're trying to do something new
and you're trying to do something
at the cutting edge we have to develop
new techniques and
um i know on a sort of smaller scale but
we talk about
formula one which is obviously a
business but there's so many
developments that have happened in
formula one for racing
that have then gone on to road cars and
so like hybrid technology and stuff
like that
and i didn't know that touchscreens were
a certain thing
 
yeah in the 70s there's some great
like retro footage of like this really
old screen that they're touching
and i should dig out again, there's a story, a motivation behind
why they wanted touch screens
in that situation but
yeah i'd have to dig out to know the
story but i know that yeah they were
invented
so that's really cool i had no idea
yeah which is one of the reasons why
it's free because there's no patent that
means that you don't have to pay to use it and
so the design was just
"here you go thanks for the public money
here's some
new technology"
wow that's amazing
and this is what we're talking
about you know nothing happens in
isolation i mean my PhD was working on
materials that are used in touch screens
for a sort of next generation
well potentially next generation
anyway i don't think
my phd as is often the case you know
science doesn't always give results
yeah but that is a result i i often have
to tell people that just because you
didn't
discover a new particle for example that
we had to look
so that was a result that's a good thing
to have done
it's not as exciting as having a
discovery but
we you know everybody contributes even
with negative results
 
actually that's a really good point that
i'd sort of like to
you know just sort of talk about because
this is it i think that i think it's
really important
even when you have those negative or null
results
that is such a huge, you know, that is
like you say that's
that's learning stuff that's improving
science but there isn't the culture of
writing papers behind that and
it's actually sort of dismissed and i
know that
when i was starting out my my PhD
i found results after two years sort of
null or negative results after two years
and other groups are like oh yeah we
knew that
but, but they didn't write about it, there
weren't any papers
so that's rubbish
because if we did that in particle
physics we would be going round and
round in circles if people didn't
publish
when they they got no results so i think
it's really important to tell people i
looked i didn't find it
so then they don't look in the same
place 
i love that you're
talking about CERN and you're talking
about particles going around in circles
sorry. I'm giggling to myself yeah
um oh yeah um
no that's good so is that is there more
of a culture of publishing
sort of these null results and negative
results because that that's just not
something i
come across in my field 
yeah we
publish
if you do a google search for consistent
with the standard model
you will get almost all of our paper
without all of our papers
no almost all there are some some
inconsistencies that we are still
teasing apart but yeah consistent
with the standard model
is we didn't find what we were we were
looking to find if
for example it's beyond the standard
model physics or supersymmetry or dark
matter
and currently everything is consistent
with this one model that we have to
explain
how most of the universe works. well, not most
of it. but most of the matter, how that works.
yeah that's i actually
i like that um yeah i actually
i actually like that. i wish we had that
in more fields because
like you say we'd save so much time and
so much research is publicly funded like
why are you not putting that information
out there?
and people spend a lot of time
on it and they deserve to be able to say
look i didn't get the result that i was
necessarily
looking for but the method was very good
and maybe they developed
new techniques for the method for
searching, or you know, with the machine
learning
i could run my machine learning
algorithm and it could say
yeah sorry everything looks normal here
but the algorithm is
could be very good and and interesting
for other people to
to look at so that's still a result even
if you don't find a new particle
 
yeah. no i um, yeah
it's a big thing i mean my PhD didn't
put out, you know, it wasn't paper worthy
in many ways and yeah i did a lot of
experiments my thesis was packed
and it's really annoying when you
know groups sort of four years later
find a little bit of extra information
and it's like they can publish stuff and
it's like i did
90% of this i just didn't get the
sexy results
i didn't get the sexy science 
so yeah, that it's um...
yeah so has i'm you know speaking of
discoveries
you've been working with CERN for 10
years is there anything that you're
particularly excited about
that you've achieved or discovered or
proved doesn't... isn't discoverable or
you know what
what's your highlight. What's your CERN
highlight
i mean my personal highlight is we
just put out a paper
looking at the four top quarks
created at the same time
so we don't call this a discovery
because it's a standard model process
but it's a
measurement of this process that had not
been done before.  well,
so the the measurements had been done
but we set limits on
how often we think it could happen
so the the theory tells us we expect it
to happen
this amount of times and we say okay we
haven't measured it
more than three times what you predict
and so that's called setting limits
and now we have a measurement that we
call evidence
which is three sigma confidence
and three standard deviations confidence
of of having this prediction
so that was a precision
measurement it was really difficult to
do it took us over two years to do this
measurement and so i'm really proud to
have been part of the team
that did this measurement and
contributed to this
this really rare measurement 
i mean obviously we also have the higgs
discovery which is very exciting
so i was a PhD student when that came
out when that was announced so i was
working on the hardware
so not directly involved in the analysis
but
we decided that, so there was a group
of the students
at CERN at the time when they were, 
when they announced the... announcement
would be in the auditorium we knew
that we weren't going to get seats
because
like loads of them were reserved
unless we
got there very early so we turned up
at midnight for a talk that started i
think at 9 00 a.m the next day
and then had a bit of a party outside of
the door
and so i was about, say, the 20th
person into the room and so i was sat
right at the back in the middle
of the auditorium and got to hear the
presentations the discussions
and just the the feeling in the room of
the community
as something that people had been
looking for for 50 years so
higgs was there Peter Higgs. Professor
Peter Higgs and Professor Francois
Ogier was there and the other theorists
as well
who were part of the the theorists
who
predicted the field and the particle
and then just so many people who've been
involved in
in the discovery in different ways
were in the room so it was just really
exciting it felt like
it felt like being at a rock concert
queueing up the night before and said
i really hope we get a seat and we can
get in there and
and then afterwards we went into the
restaurant at
CERN. i fell asleep because i barely
had any sleep so i was like this
on the table and a journalist came up to
our table
which woke me up and said i could tell
you a british i could see the pins from
the other side of the restaurant does
anyone want to talk about this result
and so i said something and i don't even
remember what i said but that was like
one of the first
articles i was quoted in because i was
like this is great
i'm so happy 
 
That's amazing, I love that. Wow
It was a fun day.
that would have really been something to
be a part of and sort of
you know, i mean yeah.
so it's the god particle right i
love it
 
i know, but we don't call it that
no, i know. 
you can say that.  i can't can say
that
yes, i can say that. 
i know
i was gonna make another joke but i
think i'll probably not
you could make it. i i couldn't... 
no, actually i'd rather not
always avoid religion 
so i'm gonna, i'm gonna switch tack a
little bit and
so like i said we know each other
through our work in sort of
outreach and and diversity trying to
push for equity in science for different
people so
how has your journey been in
STEM has it, and you don't have to talk
about anything you don't want to
obviously, but
you know, how's your journey been? has
it been okay or
have you seen stuff that you're like
i don't want anyone else to go through
this yeah i think so as an undergrad i
think i was pretty ignorant
i knew obviously that there weren't
very many
women in physics and but because i was
at then University of Manchester and it
was such a big physics department
we would have, like, so the the women
studying
in physics we would sometimes meet or
you know there would be events and so it
didn't actually seem like that few
because say there were 30
that seemed like quite a lot even
though there were 250
people studying physics in my year
overall
and so i just yeah at the time i was
just focusing on my,
on my studies and didn't really notice
it i think as i've transitioned
to a to a scientist, to this being my
career
and i've become more aware and
i have noticed a lot more,
yeah, situations where i think
oh that wouldn't happen if that person
wasn't white
for example or the number of times
people get interrupted
in meetings.
how comfortable people would be in
situations. 
just, and jokes that can exclude people
and so, and then also through doing more
of the equality and diversity work and
talking to other people and hearing
about their experiences that's also
made me more aware. so i think it's
very important for us to educate
ourselves
and i wish that there had been less
time spent
when i was an undergrad teaching me how
to be,
how to cope in science and
more efforts on, on how to
break down the barriers that meant i
would have to learn how to cope
yeah
yeah and
it's sort of interesting what you say i
was talking to someone else and
they were like oh my experience was fine
because i'm a cis white male and i
was like
yeah but you know did you have any
trouble because of your sexuality and it
was like
oh well yeah but it's not as bad as
other people like we have this really
messed up baseline
it's like "well at least you know
we're here" and it's like "well at least
this isn't happening to me" but that
doesn't mean that
the people down here are experiencing
that
yeah but also as a cis woman they
often you know you get asked to be
involved in things and so that sometimes
makes you feel a bit special and
you don't realize late until later that
you were being tokenized and that you
weren't actually being supported
and given resources they just wanted to
show how many women they had
and so it yeah now, now
like now i don't want to do any more
training of like power stances and how
to
how to project my voice and stuff like
that now i want to focus really on what
what are the barriers what are stopping
people from
from just doing great science and being
happy and
having an environment where people can
be creative because if you're stressed
all the time
about whether or not a country that the
conference you want to
go to, whether you're persecuted there
because of your gender identity or your
sexuality or
then, that... that's not the best way for
people to be able to
to be in science and then that's how we
lose people because some people just say
i'm not doing this anymore i'm going to
work in a different industry where
it's not, not well... sometimes it's not so
bad but you know
some people don't have a great
experience
yeah i think, and it's interesting
what you
you were talking about it was i think
early approaches to diversity were more
like
we're willing to have you just make sure
that you conform and be like us and do
the power stance
yeah and i heard that a lot
sort of a few years ago. i hope that
people are realizing that we shouldn't
be trying to change people i don't know
well we should change some people, but
just not the ones that they usually
focus on
you know that's a really that's an
absolutely fair point yeah
 
i would like them to do how to not be
a bigot training. and i know that they'd
sometimes do unconscious bias training
but that usually teaches people, and i've
even been involved in that i've taught
unconscious bias training myself,
but sometimes you have to be polite
to be able to get things through at all
yeah to, to be a bit more direct about
it and say here are the consequences of
your actions
and if you don't, don't learn to be
different
like you can be you can be ignorant at
the beginning
and still
have an effect but if now that you know
about it you're still
doing those things then that's actively
excluding people from science
yeah i was thinking about this
yesterday i was i was sort of
pulling together some slides on
fusion
energy and i mean we're spending
billions we're putting huge resources
huge time.
like, and we should have experiments
in another 20 years
and we're putting all the effort and the
hope that maybe
we'll get fusion energy and yet when we
ask people to change their behavior to
improve
the lives of other people it's like "well
that's too much"
yeah
it just so
something i've come to realize: so for
example this analysis i was talking
about the four tops, i really, it was such a
great experience to be in it
and we spent two years going through
every single systematic uncertainty so
we would say
this is, this is some... this is the way
we measure this
in our experiment. how does that have an
effect on our final result? could it
possibly be something else that is
influencing our result and therefore
we're not measuring what we think we're
measuring
two years of weekly meetings, of emails,
of discussions, of conferences, of
workshops
to get this result and i'm so proud of
this result
but i want us to apply the same
rigorous thinking to
the, yeah, to equality and diversity and
to
why, for example certain groups are not
represented in science
and when you try to talk to, not exactly
the same people, i'm definitely not
talking about my team but when you try
and talk to the same types of
people, scientists, practical physicists
and say
oh hey look we're not very well
represented
for black scientists in our research
maybe there is a systematic bias
within our community within the way that
you know, even at schools and
universities
throughout the career process that means
that people
are not being, black people in the uk for
example, are not
becoming particle physicists let's look
at
where that is happening let's look at
what
what biases are influencing 
people, and people go "Nah" they just don't
like it
"they just, some people just don't want to
do physics" or "there's no problem"
and i just don't understand
it make me very frustrated 
 
yeah at least
well, yeah, we've got a long way to go but
i think we are improving things like...
yeah, I don't mean to be down
 
no no no no no i completely agree and we
were talking about,
you know, we have a lot of
these conversations
and it is, it's all "how can we
improve things" and
i am glad that things are moving but i
think that some of that is... we've got a
lot more voice
so we've got a lot more, um, we can be
heard
a lot easier these days with social
media and stuff like that
and so we can't be ignored anymore
which maybe 10 years we could
yeah this is good and organizing and
talking to people in different fields is
very good as well
so to be able to see
what other people might be implementing
that could work. and learning from
scholars who are really researching on
this. so i don't pretend that i'm
actually an expert. i
talk a lot about it because i'm also
quite loud and once i get frustrated
with something i don't want to
just let it go. but there are people
whose whole jobs is to do this kind of
work in research and and so i've been
trying to read more
of their work and and sharing their...
citing them
basically, to make sure that i'm not just
nicking somebody else's work.
basically, the same as what we would expect of a good scientist
yeah due diligence and sort of, you know,
ethically useful references and stuff
like that. i mean...
yeah...
you know, um, yeah
like I say, i think it's improving.
it's great that we've got more of a
voice these days and
and the internet, you know, it has its
flaws 
but i mean, because of the internet then
some people got together and organized
the LGBT STEMinar that i went to and
that's where
i went a few years ago and that's where
i met so many other people that i'm now
working with and they've introduced me
to other people
and i know that i'm not alone
anymore. i'm not the only trans scientist
out there which
before i really got involved in, sort of
diversity on Twitter, in diversity in STEM on Twitter
you know i felt very alone and so it's
really great that
we can bring people together 
because it can be hard work
it can be, it can be really hard work
 
yeah, and also i think one of the nice
things about the group that we're in
is that we, so the the people who are
being directly affected by something
should have a voice
in in directing it but they shouldn't
have to do all the work if something's
bad is happening, if people are being
aggressive about
trans rights, then we should also... so cis
people should also
stand next to trans people and say this
is not okay and take some of the burden
because i don't think it's fair that, you know,
it's exhausting to have to deal
with things
i agree, but i also, like... 
so we're talking about the group TIGERS
in STEM, and
i love the fact that, you know, i can say
something and someone will be like
"whoa, no you've got that wrong".  that is
not, you know... that's
racist or that's ableist. but we
can have a discussion about it
and we'll listen and i come out more
educated i know more
and improved as a result of that
it's, it's nice when you can... because
you don't always feel that people will
listen to you either but i know that
within our group
if we say "no, you've got that wrong" it's
like "oh, sorry, right, why?"
and that's really nice. like, people
being able to say "yeah i don't know
everything"
which as scientists you'd think that was
a basic principle
we don't know everything otherwise we
won't be doing what we do
yeah there's a pie chart right of things
you know things you know you don't know
the things you don't know you don't know
and
we need to be better at saying there's
this whole
chunk of things we don't know and that's
okay! we'll learn
yeah exactly, um absolutely
and just talking a little bit
more
so obviously a big part of
improving, sort of inclusion, equity is
is just visibility and i know you do a
lot of
science outreach like you're involved
in different little things is there
anything that you'd like to talk about
that you
enjoy doing in terms of the science
outreach side of it
yeah i mean, maybe to start, i mean
this is where i started to get
more involved. because i wanted
to show
at the, at the time, a young woman working
in physics
as a sort of working example
of somebody in the field because yeah
representation matters 
and now, so i still do a lot of outreach
and i love talking to schools
 i do a lot of
sort of remote conversations with
schools
because they can't always travel. 
Geneva's very expensive to get to
especially during the global pandemic
people can't travel anymore
and so being able to still give
young people the experience of wonder of
being able to,
even virtually ,visit our lab and and to
understand what we're doing. because
i want people to understand. i don't want
it to be this sort of hidden...
hidden research facility. it's not it's...
it's... you can go on tours. you can,
you can talk to the scientists and we're
very happy to explain
what we're doing. but now also
i do work on enabling others to do
outreach. so i want
because, as you said, representation is so
important
i don't represent everybody so i want to
make sure that
other people can also do outreach so
that they can
be representative for their groups and i
think that's, that's...
important as well
 
oh that's really good. and i think...
and thats... and that's, yeah, the basic
principle of
you know, real equity. Is giving
other people
a voice and allowing them to have
their voice and giving them that
platform that's really cool
 
so yeah, that whole it's the whole
imagery of climbing a ladder right
there's some people that will climb the
ladder
and and they'll just climb on their own
and say "great. now i'm here"
 but there are other people that
sort of
help the people following to climb up
the ladder as well
and that's how you bring people up with
you. i don't want to climb on my own, i
think that's very lonely
and i think it's important that we bring
everybody else up with us 
yeah
and unfortunately i do know people that
would kick the ladder down
after they've got to the top as well.
so, um
sad but i also... i'm loving the image...
i mean do you have like, big
waddles of school children, like 
10 year olds, running around the large
hadron collider and poking things?
 
not in the tunnel although we have
had open days where people can
go down into the tunnel but that's quite
rare i've only been into the tunnel once.
so it's quite funny when i
went to New York a few years ago
and i went to the UN and had a tour and
while i was there
in the in the canteen i thought "oh how
strange it would be
to just have tour groups in your, in your
work canteen"
and then i remembered that that's
exactly CERN. that's what happens all
the time
and i just sort of, don't really, you know...
it was just so normal i didn't really
think about it
um but yeah we when everything is open
and functioning
without a pandemic, we often have
school groups that come and visit
certain and it's really great sometimes
they're all in jumpers with sort of
science-y themed nicknames on them, and
it's nice to see them and what i really
love about doing outreach and talking to
people about what we do
is that i can get very bogged down in
the code. i might spend all of my day
trying to work out one bug and that can
be very frustrating.
 and you get, you know, you're
just working on this very
small part of the whole thing. but when
you do outreach and talk to people
about the work that we're doing then it
reminds me of the
the bigger picture the motivation for
doing it and just the excitement on
people's faces when you can show them
the detector
i also benefit from it because i
get reminded of how cool
is the work that we're doing. so i think
it's great to share.
 
that's really funny actually because you
were you were sharing that story about
being in the canteen and
and how strange it would be to have
people looking around and i was thinking
yeah,
i can't imagine having people coming
around my lab. and then i realized that
yeah normally i have about 10 to 20
schools a year coming to my lab and i've
built demos
to show them super conductivity.
so you forget. that's interesting.
it's so embedded and we do it
so naturally that we sort of forget that
we do it
and i'm often trying to avoid
spilling liquid nitrogen on our school
children because you know
that would be a lot of paperwork, so...
 
yep
well that's amazing is there anything
else that you
sort of want to mention whether science
or outreach and
feel free if there's not.
 
i think we covered a lot. i don't think
there's, 
there's nothing on the top of my head
that i think "oh we didn't talk about
this"
i mean we could keep talking for hours
i'm sure but
i don't think there's a big thing that
we missed.
yeah, no definitely
yeah. but definitely we could be talking for hours, it's as simple as that.
i'm loving it! but
but i've taken quite a bit of your time so
i really, really appreciate you coming on
and
chatting and thanks for sharing the work
you do 
and like saying i'm really privileged to
work with you, to know you.
and i think you're an amazing advocate
and it's,
it's it's great that i've got all
these friends that i'm just like "wow,
this person's amazing" it's awesome so
thank you so much
 
well thank you for inviting me on and
the feeling is mutual i'm so impressed
with all the work that you're doing both
in your research
and the advocacy work that you're
doing so it's a pleasure to be on your
channel
oh thank you so much! well excellent 
yeah so with that i'll say goodbye to
the viewers. thank you so much for
watching and
i'll catch you again with another
chat at some point and do follow
Clara on, you know, social medias and
stuff. i'll put some links below so
thanks so much again
and take care everyone bye-bye
bye
wow that was awesome
that was so cool. so i love
these videos and i get to learn more
each time so
thank you so much Clara for taking the
time to chat
the next video i've got recorded is
with
Dr Izzy Jayasinghe
I need to do a little bit of editing
on it but i'm
actually hoping to put that out a little
bit sooner
i just need to check on the um...
the sound really. so yeah
like say don't forget to follow Clara
and if you could like & subscribe to this
video that'd be brilliant and i'll see
you again soon until next time.
Wahh...i almost knocked my cup over. 
can you believe it
until next time take care bye
