12 May 2010

Lucie de Nooij

Nationality: Dutch


Lucie with her horse, Prince

“I‘m very outgoing,”says Lucie de Nooij, without hesitation.“That may be a Dutch thing, but it‘s also very much me.”

“I can say and do stuff that other people would think, ‘ooh!’,” she describes, wincing,“and then end it with a laugh, and everybody will laugh,”Although people joke that one day she&‘ll put her foot in it with someone important, Lucie‘s no-fear approach to life has so far served her well.

“I‘m not really the kind of physicist who always wanted to do physics,” she admits. Indeed, her best subject in school was Ancient Greek. By the time she finished high school though the idea had caught hold.

At Amsterdam University, she enrolled in a ‘Beta-Gamma’ degree programme – the Beta part covering physics and mathematics, and the Gamma part in economics, sociology and psychology. After one year, she whittled her focus down to pure physics, with economics as a minor.

When it came to choosing her Masters subject, the economist in her decided it would be more economical to choose physics, as just a further six months on the end of that would earn her an economics Masters too. But things didn’t pan out that way; Lucie‘s confidence had landed her a job as a headhunter while she was at university and, four months before she was due to graduate, one of the companies she‘d met through that – Shell – wanted her for themselves:

“I didn‘t really want to decide just yet on whether I was going to do a PhD or maybe travel abroad, but Shell offered me a really nice salary, and said ’we need you to tell us what you’ll do, by the end of next week.’”

The idea of a PhD appealed because it represented another four years of being expected to seek answers to questions; of no-one being upset if she didn’t have the answers yet.

“I ended up with two offers – one from Shell, to drill for gas in the north of the Netherlands, and one from Amsterdam University, for four years with one year at CERN. The choice didn’t seem too hard to me,” she smiles.

Like most PhD students, Lucie’s time is split between service work – hers on the SCT, taking shifts and contributing to programs used in the Control Room – and analysis. “It‘s not too bad to have two things in hand,” she considers. “I know most people hate that, but if I get stuck with one, I‘ll go and work a little bit on the other for a while. That actually works for me.”

Her analysis involves finding resonances of known particles – an area which some consider unglamorous and even pointless, since they are well known from previous experiments. “I find it interesting because you can use real data right from the beginning,” she reasons. “People are trying to use these resonances to actually extract background values for later – maybe they‘ll even be used in a Higgs analysis, or top quark.”

After starting her PhD in April 2009, Lucie arrived at CERN in January this year. Proving the old adage that positive things happen to positive people, her long-term boyfriend managed to find a job in Geneva, starting on the exact same date as her stint here. In two car journeys, they moved their mattress, stereo, and clothes to Geneva Old Town from their house in Amsterdam.

The break from the “constant” rain of the Netherlands is a welcome change for Lucie, but she has found Swiss people to be of less sunny disposition: “The Dutch are very spontaneous. To the point where they‘ll get involved with strangers on the street,” she explains. “This is considered nice – to say, for example, ‘oh, your shoelace is off, be careful you don’t fall‘!’”

By comparison, she finds the Swiss rather distant. “If you get into the tram, nobody smiles at you. Everybody looks the other way! I thought it was extremely rude, but it’s not – it‘s just… formal. I really had to get used to that.”

One area where Switzerland is definitely scoring points with seasoned skier Lucie, though, is the mountains. From age eight, she holidayed in Grächen (CH) each year with her parents, and would go out racing with a local Swiss girl and her father. “I still like to have the big slopes and just go” she grins.

She spent several months teaching skiing in Austria right before starting her PhD, and made the most of every Saturday and Sunday in Switzerland this winter, but with the end of the season, she‘s looking for something new. “Now the skiing is really over, I need a horse,” she says, in the absence of Prince, the horse she shares with a friend back in Amsterdam.

Another thing she‘s had to leave behind, for now, is her involvement with political party, the Democrats: “I used to go to a discussion every now and then … The democrats have many people with different studies, and I like the idea that you have that kind of expertise discussing where the Netherlands should go.”

She hasn‘t let go her political leanings altogether though, and was pleased to take part in the recent Women‘s Day celebrations, following a radio interview where a male presenter had asserted that physics wasn‘t sexy and then asked her what she was wearing.

“Later on I thought, ‘It‘s none of his business!’ And he would have never asked that to a guy. I didn‘t like the notion that I needed to be sexy in any way in order to do my job,” she explains. “So I liked the idea of doing something positive for women‘s day. Many of these feminist events tend to have a complaining air, but this was actually showing that things are going well, and I liked that.”

 

 

 

Ceri Perkins

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