Approximately thirty virtual tours with thousands of visitors at the underground ATLAS detector Nikhef researcher Clara Nellist led in recent years, mostly in corona times. On Thursday she will receive an outstanding achievement award for it from the experiment.
The award, British Nellist says emphatically, is for the team who organise the virtual tours of the ATLAS experiment at CERN. “We’ve shown maybe a hundred thousand interested people our experiment and our work over the years through online tours,” she estimates. “Live this would never be possible.”
Such online tours with a camera crew and an Internet connection are a great opportunity to show schoolchildren, for example, CERN and the experiments there. Nellist: “At my own school there was really no money to travel to Geneva at the time. Virtually, of course, that’s no problem at all. All you need is the Internet and some time.”
“What you hope is that you inspire and interest students in particle physics. Experiments like ATLAS can’t do without new students and researchers. In addition, the tours are also good for busting all the myths surrounding CERN and particle research. You show very directly that we are very open and have nothing to hide. At CERN, only the particles have secrets.”
“For myself, by the way, the work is also very instructive. You often get very good questions from the visitors, which in turn make you think about what you actually want to know and why. If all you do is analyze and code, it’s easy to forget.”
Earlier Clara Nellist obtained her PhD in Manchester and now she a fellow at Radoud Universiteit in Nijmegen. She is doing scientific research at ATLAS and Nikhef into the top quark in particular.
In recent years, however, she has also gained some fame for her short video clips about CERN and particles on TikTok, a social medium for young viewers in particular. Innovative and refreshing, was the opinion of the British physics magazine Physics World.
Nellist: “With TikTok you reach a lot of people who would never look up science on their own. That makes it limited, but certainly interesting for outreach. You broadcast widely and hope to arouse some interest here and there. And I also learn a lot from it. For example, that you have to know very well what you want to say. There is no room or patience for chatter.”
Starting in September, Clara Nellist will work as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, where she will mainly develop and provide practicals for younger students. “It’s about physics experimentation in the broadest sense there, but inevitably some elements about particle physics will creep in,” she says.