Professor of Physics Geoff Dougherty is the liaison faculty at Channel Islands for the CSU-wide Nuclear and Particle Physics Consortium NUPAC. Since 2013 he has facilitated internships at
CERN for 1-3 students annually, following preparatory coursework in nuclear physics and programming and a very competitive assessment process.
The students complete 8 weeks on ATLAS computing projects and attend the famous CERN Summer
Student Lecture Series. They join other CSU students and are assigned to a research team and local advisor at CERN. They work on improving algorithms and the development of tools to monitor the sub-detectors, and analyze ATLAS data.
In 2018, two of our students Rhiannan Ruef (a Math major) and Matthew Marsee (an Applied
Physics major) spent the summer with separate research groups. Rhiannan worked on DQM (data quality monitoring) within the FTK (Fast TracKer) project, a system that will speed up the decision time of the trigger system in the ATLAS detector. Matthew worked
on Heavy Higgs analysis in the 550 to 750 GeV range, completely debugging and running a previously constructed plotting file which reads the information from two files of the complete collider data.
Both of them returned elated and exhilarated by their experience, and presented the results
of their internship in a special seminar to students at CI.