LHC Lunch
Meet Helena Malbouisson
Quick Facts
- Age: 33
- Status: Post-doc
- Home Institution: University of Nebraska
- Home Town: Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
- Years at CERN: 3
- CERN Affliation: CMS
An experimental lifestyle
Although she insists she chose her career independently, particle physics runs in the family for Helena Malbouisson. Her father is a theoretical physicist who worked at CERN for three months every year while she was a child.
“I’m totally happy doing particle physics,” Malbouisson said. She started her undergraduate work in cosmology but switched when it got too abstract.
“I think particle accelerators are much more exciting,” she said. With them “you either confirm [a model] or you don’t. You can’t be more down to Earth than that.”
She is an experimentalist, while her father is a theorist. When he spent a month last year at CERN, they rarely discussed physics. “It was great seeing him every day, but it’s so different what we do,” she said.
Still, Malbouisson considers growing up and seeing that a career in physics offered a chance to do real experiments as a factor that probably helped determine her path.
A flair for the arts also runs in Malbouisson’s family. Her mother is a potter. Her brother is a musician, playing guitar and using computers to produce new sounds.
“I do experimental physics,” Malbouisson said. “He does experimental music.” In the past, she sang in a pop-rock band with him but ultimately gave it up to study.
Careers in physics have taken Malbouisson and her family around the globe. When she was ages 10 to 13, and then again at 16, they lived just outside of Paris while her father taught physics at the Ecole Polytechnique. Malbouisson started her own career in Brazil and then got a job at Fermilab, outside of Chicago. There she met her husband, who is German.
Now she and her husband split their time between Switzerland, where she works, and Germany, where he works, travelling by train to visit one another for weekends. Sometimes he stays at CERN for a while, since he is part of the laboratory’s ATLAS experiment. The arrangement isn’t so odd for physicist couples, Malbouisson says, since it can be hard to find a job in the same place.
When Malbouisson was looking for post-doc positions, one of her personal requirements was to work at CERN. “In my opinion, it’s where everything happens, so it’s the best place to be,” she said. She’s been working for the University of Nebraska on the CMS experiment at the European laboratory since 2008.
She meets and learns to work with lots of different people in her job. “I never thought I’d have friends from Japan, Russia,” she said. “I feel like my heart is scattered all over the world.”
We’d been talking for an hour when Malbouisson paused to reflect on all she’d told me. She summed herself up: “I’m Brazilian, married to a German, living in Switzerland and working for an American University. But I think that’s life for an experimental physicist.”