I am Meera Al Mehairi, a Mechanical - Nuclear Engineering undergrad  from Khalifa University, United Arab Emirates.

In CERN , I'm working in PH-DT department under the supervision of  Dr. Roberto Guida. At the beginning I had some handouts and research papers which discuss particle detectors and gas analysis in details. In my opinion, this was a very important educational step especially that I lack previous knowledge and experience in this field.

At the moment, I’m working with gas chromatographs, which are gas analysers that basically separates a mixture of gasses into its main components relative to time. This is done by passing the vaporized mixture through a tube containing a material that retards some components more than others.  As a result, we will not only be able to identify the components, but also measure their concentration. The data are first collected from the gas chambers used in the four LHC experiments here at CERN. After that, they are analyzed using software called Soprane. The figure below shows the usual obtained data, where each peak indicates a certain component of the mixture, while the peak’s integration measures the concentration. 

What I love the most about my summer program that I don’t only analyze data, or stay all the time in the office, I actually get the chance to visit a lot of laboratories such as GIF ( Gamma Irradiation Faculty ), LHCb and CMS regularly. My supervisor Dr. Roberto always says “it is very important to have a sense of what you work on”.  

As for the lectures, I have to say that ‘Beyond the Standard Model’ was absolutely my Favorite set of lectures, as it was well explained and very interesting. Whereas for the workshops, the Cloud chamber was the best, and I recommended a lot of my friends to register for it, because it was a simple and fun group work for the theories we have been learning. Below are the pictures of the workshop. 

In CERN I developed skills of research, team work, leadership and creativity. In addition, I had a lot of friends from different countries and I am really glad I met them, because I believe it is such an amazing cultural enrichment. For example, by now I know how to cook Mexican food, how to sing a Hungarian song and how to speak English with an Italian accent. Moreover, I visited Geneva and took amazing photos. Below are some pictures of the lake.