Working at the Big Bang Machine

von Margarete Endl

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Angela Brett has never been to Wiener Neustadt, a small town south of Vienna, Austria. “I hope that they have good public transport”, she says. That’s what she will need if she moves from Geneva to Wiener Neustadt in three or four years. At that time, MedAustron, a new and ultra modern center for ion therapy will be put into operation. And Angela Brett, a programmer, may be part of the team to do just that. But as someone who has cerebral palsy and can't walk very far, she is dependent on good public transportation.

 

Right now, Angela Brett is one of 17 scientists (one woman, 16 men) who are working on the MedAustron project while being based at CERN. The place situated in a Geneva suburb is the Mecca for high energy physicists who do research on the origins of the universe. The particle accelerator LHC which went into operation two years ago should help recreate on a minuscule level the seconds after the big bang. However, the LHC is not just a very expensive toy to satisfy the drive for knowledge of humankind. With the same technology, it is possible to fight against malignant tumors which cannot be treated by normal radiation. At the MedAustron center, a sort of mini LHC will be used for cancer treatment.

 

Programming computers at eight

Angela Brett learned to program computers when she was eight years old. “My elder brothers taught me to program as soon as I could read”. Not every little girl learns how to program. This happened even in the late 1980s when personal computers were still rare. Shortly afterwards, Angela got her first computer of her own to do her homework. “My doctors discovered that I was quite slow at writing because I had only 50 percent use of my hands”.

When she was nine years old, her doctors found out other troublesome things. “They discovered that it was impossible for me to talk because apparently something was paralyzed in the back of my throat. But I had already been talking”. Shortly after her birth, the doctors had thought that she would never be able to walk. „But I seemed pretty smart, so the doctors thought they could fool me into walking if they could get my feet into the right position. And they operated on me a lot earlier than they normally would.“ She was lucky. Now she can walk, although with some difficulties.

 

Stubbornly pursuing her goals

At age 16 she had the next big surgery and had to stay in the hospital and rehabilitation for much of the school year. Only her math teacher regularly brought her work to do. That’s probably one of the reasons why she studied math later. After the bachelor’s degree she took a job as a software developer for Windows programs. In her spare time she worked on Apple applications. At 24, she wanted to go to an Apple Developer Conference in California and travel the world. “I thought that maybe I could visit CERN and looked at the website”. She found out that there were fellowship programs to work at CERN. So she stubbornly worked at working at CERN. She applied for a fellowship, was rejected, applied again, was accepted. Not every young woman who wants to quit her boring job will go to the other side of the world – Angela Brett lived in New Zealand.

 

So one day in March 2005 she limped into the airplane that took her to the big bang machine in Geneva. At CERN she was part of the team at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment which is one of two big experiments to examine the collisions of the two proton beams produced by the LHC. She worked in the trigger and data acquisition group of CMS. The trigger system sorts out and saves the most important data out of a sheer endless amount of data. She was mostly working on database software to store the state of the detector and other information.

 

And since January 2010, Angela Brett has been working for MedAustron. What else would she like to do? “It would be cool to program a completely new vehicle for Venus expeditions”. The only thing she has not yet considered is to go to Venus herself.

Dieser Beitrag ist im Rahmen des Projektes "Lebens- und Arbeitswelten" erschienen.

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