The person behind
the work.

I am Arturo Sánchez Pineda. Physicist, infrastructure leader, lecturer and programme builder. Venezuelan, based in Switzerland, and working across four languages.

The first push came at eleven, from a physics textbook I found at my grandparents’ house, about how physics runs through industry and society. The second came from a computing course where I learned to take machines apart and put them back together. By the first year of secondary school I knew that computers and physics were what kept me awake. Studying was not a path but the only path: when I graduated in 2008, only a couple of relatives had a university degree, my grandfather the surveyor among them. What never ran short at home was the sense of work.

At Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, I combined physics research with teaching appointments across Engineering, Humanities and Science. My undergraduate thesis was supervised by Gianfranco Spavieri, with whom I published on electromagnetic theory and later on relativity and light propagation.

From May 2008 to February 2009, I was a HELEN Fellow at LPNHE in Paris, researching ATLAS reconstruction algorithms. HELEN, the High Energy Physics Latin American–European Network, was funded through the European Union’s ALFA programme to connect research institutions and support scientific exchange. LPNHE was then jointly affiliated with UPMC, Paris Diderot and CNRS; today it is associated with Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité and CNRS.

I earned my PhD in Fundamental and Applied Physics at Università di Napoli Federico II in 2013. Within ATLAS at CERN, I contributed to Higgs research and co-authored the collaboration’s 2012 discovery paper. Research and computing became parts of the same work: understanding the data and building the systems that make analysis possible.

My roles developed in parallel: ATLAS TDAQ system administrator at CERN, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Udine, INFN associate and ICTP research associate in high-energy physics, cosmology and astroparticle physics. In 2021, I worked at LAPP as a CNRS postdoctoral fellow. Today I lead IT infrastructure and operations at INAIT, carrying that research discipline into business.

I joined INAIT in December 2021 as Senior DevOps Engineer & Corporate Infrastructure Manager and became Lead IT Infrastructure in August 2023. My work connects cloud and local infrastructure, DevOps, AI and robotics enablement, operational governance and everyday IT. I also handle budgets, vendors, procurement and office infrastructure. Working with scientists, programmers and mathematicians, I turn technical needs into usable environments and follow through on the engineering, coordination and support they require.

I co-founded LA-CoNGA physics and helped to organise it, the Erasmus+ programme linking universities in Latin America and Europe. I also co-lead ICTP’s Physics Without Frontiers in the Americas and co-founded CoAfina in 2022 and co-organise it. These projects connect technical training, open science and collaboration with opportunities to put them into practice.

Spanish, English, French and Italian are part of how I work, teach and connect people across borders.

This collection makes room for the person around the work: the places, people, and small stories that give the projects their context. It is something I can keep adding to as life happens.