Bienvenue!

By the end of World War II, Europe found itself low on physicists and laboratories. While the fields of quantum mechanics and particle physics were rapidly developing, Europe's stronghold in these sciences had been located in Germany. Many of those physicists had immigrated to the US or joined the German war effort and were arrested at the war's end. In an effort to revive physics in Europe, the remaining physicists pushed to create a European Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire), dubbed CERN. Eleven countries agreed to create the council, which selected a site outside of Geneva, Switzerland for its new laboratory. Following ratification of the CERN Convention in 1954 by the original 12 founding countries, the council was dissolved and the European Organization for Nuclear Research was born.


The acronym CERN was kept, though, probably because it was easier to say than OERN.


Now, over 50 years later, CERN is home to the world's largest and highest energy particle collider, several nuclear and particle physics experiments, and what has to be the largest collection of advanced physics degrees and would-be computer geeks on the planet Earth. Laboratories and universities in 63 countries contribute money, equipment, and manpower to its experiments in return for access to the data collected. Post-docs and graduate students from all over the world come to CERN to build and maintain equipment, take shifts in the control rooms, and analyze data for presentations, publications, and dissertations.

That's why I'm here. I'm a graduate student in high energy particle physics working in one of the experimental collaborations at CERN. After finishing my coursework, my adviser arranged for me to move to CERN to do the research for my dissertation in person. Here I am, analyzing data along with other students and post-docs from my university, and here I'll stay, until my adviser and I agree that I'll get more done back in the US.

Doing research at the largest physics lab in the world, on the door-step of a country famed for its chocolate? Completely awesome.


http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/about/History-en.html