There are many quirks of being an ex-high energy particle physicist who completed their PhD with the CMS experiment. For one, waking up in the middle of the night for an upset child doesn’t seem too bad compared to the many nights when I was “on-call” and woken up at 3am to help debug data collection issues with our experiment. I would much rather be “on-call” for my son than for a 14,000 tonne inanimate object.
Another quirk is that I am a year into my Postdoc at Carnegie Science and only now am I publishing my first ever first author paper. It is hard, in fact nearly impossible, to get to the front of the 3,000 person author list for the papers published by the CMS experiment. Needless to say, I did not make it to the front while I was part of the CMS team.
Now, I have the pleasure of being the first of only four authors on a paper discussing data cleaning and preparation for use in our energy models. While not the most glorious of papers, we hope this paper and the data we cleaned can be used by the energy modeling community. After all, more realistic data leads to more realistic models.
See this friendly blog post about the paper.