A gender balance roadmap for FCC

Livia Lapadatescu — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 14:38:44 +0000

A gender balance roadmap for FCC
by Johannes Gutleber (CERN) with Livia Lapadatescu (CERN)

Video produced by the FCC gender equality working group, aimed at encouraging women to take part in the project. Image credit: FCC

During the FCC Annual Meeting which took place in Washington DC in March 2015, a dedicated session was organized with the objective of laying the foundation towards the establishment of a gender balance roadmap for the FCC Collaboration.

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) Study is an international endeavour that fosters cross-disciplinary research involving many knowledge domains. This setup represents an ideal opportunity to reinforce the representation of women in the European science landscape and to stimulate the attractiveness of technical and scientific projects among them. Furthermore, the FCC study through the EuroCirCol Horizon 2020 project is committed to work towards equal representation of women and men in leadership positions.

About 60 participants, including senior scientists and decision-makers from CERN and other institutes involved in the FCC Collaboration, took part in the Gender Equality Session during the FCC Annual Meeting. The session was organised to balance the sharing of experience from representatives of the engineering and physics world with best practices established by government and funding agencies and was chaired by the CERN Diversity Programme Leader, Geneviève Guinot, and the FCC Deputy Coordinator Frank Zimmermann.

Prof. Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General designate, opened the session with a short introductory Q&A session and emphasized the importance of providing an environment of equal opportunities for men and women and monitoring its evolution.

Other speakers included Dr. Theodore Hodapp, Director of Education and Diversity of American Physical Society (APS), Dr. Kate Duncan, current IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) Coordinator for the Eastern US region, Ms. Anne-Marie Horowitz from the US Department of Energy (DoE) and Dr. Jessie DeAro, from National Science Foundation (NSF). They outlined their organisations’ visions and plans to ensure gender equality.

The session closed with the projection of a video produced by the FCC gender equality working group, aimed at encouraging women to take part in the project (see video above). The video is a pilot towards further development of other FCC gender-targeted communication strategies.

“The session marked the starting point towards a common task force”, says Geneviève Guinot, “The fact that this effort is part of the study right from the beginning is a wonderful opportunity. Next steps will include the structuring of the gender equality taskforce to make our actions a sustainable part of the FCC Collaboration”.

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FCC week

issue 14

Forging links between industry and fundamental science

Livia Lapadatescu — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 09:34:10 +0000

Forging links between industry and fundamental science
by Johannes Gutleber (CERN) with Alexandra Welsch (UNILIV)

Industry participation - exhibitor stand
Image credit: FCC

A future energy frontier research infrastructure requires current technologies to be pushed far beyond the state-of-the-art. Achieving collider parameters in an affordable and sustainable manner calls for breakthroughs in technologies, such as high-field magnets, superconducting radiofrequency cavities, and efficient RF power sources. This creates unprecedented opportunities for partnerships between academia and industry to the benefit of society.

The FCC study is committed to involving industry partners from the beginning, to jointly define the research and development roadmaps and to launch knowledge transfer programs. Starting collaboration at an early stage creates a mutually beneficial situation. It helps industry carry out strategic planning and provides the research community with better confidence in product quality and enhanced cost control. Nine key players from industry joined FCC Week as sponsors and several more attended the technical sessions, giving a glimpse of both the technical capabilities and economical needs that are required to overcome today’s technical limits.

For example, the R&D program of a 16 Tesla superconducting accelerator magnet, suitable for a 100 TeV hadron collider, calls for focused activities around the improvement of Nb3Sn based low-temperature superconductors in sufficiently large quantities and with ample performance margin, never produced before. Potential suppliers not only face the obvious challenges with respect to an increase of the critical current density and the sustained delivery of large quantities at high quality levels, but also the need to deliver improved materials and quantities at affordable cost for high-energy physics applications, as well as for other solid business cases.

To better understand the opportunities for high field applications in all relevant domains, dedicated technical R&D will be required together with business-case scouting, as foreseen by the EuroCirCol knowledge and innovation management task.

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knowledge and innovation

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issue 14

accelerating-news-arc.web.cern.ch - FCC week

A gender balance roadmap for FCC

Forging links between industry and fundamental science