Eduardo Rodrigues Awarded Prestigious CERN Scientific Associateship
Many congratulations to Eduardo, a senior researcher within the Particle Physics LHCb group, who has just been awarded a CERN scientific associateship. These competitive awards are given to established physicists who lead or perform critical aspects of an experiment’s operation and physics programme. In Eduardo’s case the associateship will support his leadership and commissioning of the Data Processing and Analysis (DPA) project of the LHCb experiment [LHCb] at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland [CERN].
Indeed, the LHCb experiment has very recently seen first proton-proton collisions at a world-record energy with its brand-new detector designed to cope with much more demanding data-taking conditions [FirstCollisions]. The associateship will also support Eduardo's continued commitments to computing and software projects of wider use within the Particle Physics community.
The LHCb experiment has undergone a significant upgrade for the third run (data taking period) of the CERN collider LHC, which started this year (and for which Liverpool assembled and delivered the VELO pixel detector, which determines with very high precisions where the LHC beam protons collide). Amongst other things, LHCb is expected to increase its data volume by a factor of 30 in this period of data taking. The DPA project is a major overhaul of the LHCb offline analysis framework to allow LHC to exploit this increase in dataflow. It is a multidisciplinary project involving computing, trigger and physics analysis expertise, and is crucial for LHCb to produce physics measurements. Eduardo has led the DPA project since its establishment in 2020.
Eduardo also supports wider computing and software projects: he created the PyHEP, “Python in HEP” [PyHEP] (HEP stands for High Energy Physics, a common synonym for Particle Physics at the highest energies), working group within the HEP Software Foundation [HSF]. He also co-founded the Scikit-HEP project [Scikit-HEP] for a Big Data Python ecosystem for Particle Physics which is used by Particle Physics collaborations such as ATLAS, Belle-II, CMS, KM3NeT and LHCb, as well as by theorists and other HEP software projects.
When asked what the associateship meant, Eduardo replied: “Being awarded a prestigious CERN Scientific Associateship means much for myself, my career,
and effectively the community I represent - colleagues committing a fair share of their effort to computing and software activities, including community projects.”
Best of luck, and congratulations again Eduardo!
References:
[LHCb] LHCb expriment home page https://lhcb.web.cern.ch/ and page at CERN https://home.cern/science/experiments/lhcb
[CERN] CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, https://home.cern/
[FirstCollisions] "First collisions at the world-record energy for a brand-new LHCb detector",
https://lhcb-outreach.web.cern.ch/2022/07/05/first-collisions-at-the-world-record-energy-for-a-brand-new-lhcb-detector/
[HSF] High Energy Physics (HEP) Software Foundation (HSF), https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/
[PyHEP] "Python in HEP" Working Group within the HSF, https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/workinggroups/pyhep.html
[Scikit-HEP] Scikit-HEP project , https://scikit-hep.org/