• Question: Is CERN a project or company? How did you come into contact with CERN?

    Asked by allo to Ben, Mario on 10 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by bussellash, varleyedwards.
    • Photo: Mario Campanelli

      Mario Campanelli answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      Cern is an international organisation, funded in 1954, so almost 60 years ago! It is by far the first example of inter-European cooperation, just a few years after WW2.
      It is completely public, and actually funded by 20 member states plus 6 observer, non-european ones.
      I first came to Cern in 1994, to work on my master thesis

    • Photo: Ben Smart

      Ben Smart answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      As Mario says, CERN is a public organisation. Governments from lots of different countries give us money so that we can do scientific research. As scientists we are pretty much free to study whatever we like. The people who give us money just hope that we will come up with some brilliant ideas that will eventually help the economy and help humanity too. To give a couple of examples, a lot of the stuff we do at CERN is used to make computers faster or make better medical scanners in hospitals, so that helps everyone.

      I first heard about CERN when I was in school, but I first started working on things at CERN when I was doing my Masters (my 5th year at university). For my Masters I had to do a project, and so for my project I studied some of the first data that was produced by the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

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