HELEN Fellowship · LPNHE, Paris
From Mérida to LPNHE in Paris: a ten-month HELEN fellowship, ATLAS reconstruction research and a European–Latin American scientific network.
A HELEN Fellow in Paris
From May 2008 to February 2009, I was a HELEN Fellow at the Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies (LPNHE) in Paris. I had completed my physics degree at Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida in February 2008; the fellowship supported ten months of research on ATLAS, the particle-physics experiment at CERN.
This was a research appointment within an international cooperation programme, connecting my university background in Venezuela with the scientific work of a European laboratory.
Reconstruction algorithms for ATLAS
My work focused on studying the performance of ATLAS reconstruction algorithms. Reconstruction turns detector signals into quantities that physicists can analyse; testing its performance is part of establishing how reliably an experiment can interpret what it records.
On 20 January 2009, I presented a comparison of basic quantities in dijet and top samples at CERN’s Jet/Etmiss meeting on jet algorithms. That presentation records a concrete part of my contribution during the fellowship.
Exhibit 2TimelineFilled points are my milestones; hollow points are the context they sit in
The fellowship in practice
A network built for scientific exchange
HELEN stands for High Energy Physics Latin American–European Network. Funded through the European Union’s ALFA programme, it brought together 38 universities — 22 in Latin America and 16 in Europe — alongside CERN and the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina.
The programme ran from July 2005 to April 2009. It funded research mobility so that young scientists could participate in advanced experiments and work with the technologies behind them. My Paris fellowship formed part of that wider effort to make international research accessible.
Exhibit 1DiagramRead left to right
From Mérida to Paris, and what the network made possible
Five stations in five years. The band underneath is the programme that paid for the second one: a network of 38 universities and two laboratories, funded by the European Union to move young scientists between the two continents.
Paris in the longer scientific journey
During my fellowship, LPNHE was jointly affiliated with UPMC (Paris VI), Université Paris Diderot (Paris VII) and CNRS. Today it is a joint research unit of Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité and CNRS. UPMC became part of the present Sorbonne Université when it was created in 2018.
After Paris, my university teaching continued in Mérida. In 2010 I began my doctorate at Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, completing it in 2013. HELEN belongs to that early trajectory linking Venezuela, European laboratories, ATLAS research and scientific computing.
Exhibit 3ResourcesOpen the thing itself, not a description of it
Where to go from here
- ProfileMy June 2016 CV: HELEN fellowship and January 2009 presentationtwiki.orgHELEN fellowship recipient and researcher on ATLAS reconstruction algorithms; the CV also records my January 2009 presentation at CERN.
- ArticleCERN: the HELEN network and its European Union supporthome.cern
- ArticleCERN: an interview with HELEN’s creatorsep-news.web.cern.ch
- RecordLPNHE: activity report for 2008–2009lpnhe.in2p3.fr
- ProfileLPNHE: the laboratory and its current affiliationslpnhe.in2p3.fr
- ArticleSorbonne Université: the history of UPMC and the 2018 mergersorbonne-universite.fr
Sources & further reading
- My June 2016 CV: HELEN fellowship and January 2009 presentation
- CERN: the HELEN network and its European Union support
- CERN: an interview with HELEN’s creators
- LPNHE: activity report for 2008–2009
- LPNHE: the laboratory and its current affiliations
- Sorbonne Université: the history of UPMC and the 2018 merger