Guido Tonelli elected next CMS spokesperson
Guido Tonelli has been elected as the next CMS spokesperson. He will take over from Jim Virdee on January 1, 2010, and will head the collaboration through the first crucial year of data-taking.
"It will be very tough and there will be enormous pressure," explains Guido Tonelli, CMS spokesperson-elect. "It will be the first time that CMS will run for a whole year so it is important to go through the checklist to be able to take good quality data." Tonelli, who is currently CMS Deputy spokesperson, will take over from Jim Virdee on January 1, 2010 – only a few months into CMS’s first full year of data-taking. "The collisions will probably be different to our expectations. So it’s going to take the effort of the entire collaboration worldwide to be ready for this new phase."
Born in Italy, Tonelli originally studied at the University of Pisa, where he is now a Professor in physics. He came to CERN in 1976 and worked on fixed target experiments in the North Area. From 1981 to 1987 he worked on CDF, a general-purpose experiment at the Tevatron in Fermilab, before returning to CERN to work on the ALEPH experiment at LEP. He came to the CMS collaboration to work on the Central Tracking System in 1993 and later became deputy spokesperson in January 2007.
With 16 years’ experience working in the CMS experiment, Tonelli can appreciate what it takes to manage such an international collaboration, and he certainly hopes to keep the whole CMS community engaged in the next stage: "Involving and communicating with all CMS collaborators around the world has been one of the major goals of the present administration, and one I hope to continue so that everyone can contribute to the physics outcome of our experiment."
"We will need to extract the first results from the data and publish the first physics papers of the experiment. As the experiment enters a new phase, I am continuing discussions with members of the collaboration about possible areas of improvement." He concludes: "I’m also discussing the transition period with Jim [Virdee] and collecting his advice so that the transition is smooth and effective."
