23 April 2009

Helenka Przysiezniak Frey

Nationality: Canadian



Helenka Przysiezniak Frey


Harry Potter fans can probably sympathise with Helenka Przysiezniak Frey’s initial reaction to being profiled for e-News. “My husband tells me: do it,” she wrote in an email, but her latest reading material had left her with some reservations: “[The Harry Potter] equivalent of ATLAS e-News, the Daily Prophet, says all kinds of lies about Harry and co.”

Helenka didn’t let her initial doubts stand in her way though. Her sense of adventure is ingrained.

“I grew up in the countryside north of Montreal,” she explains. “My Dad’s Polish and when he came to Canada, his dream was to explore forests… We’d go on two-week-long canoeing trips where you wouldn’t see anyone at all. Just a moose!”

Trips like these instilled a love for the outdoors in Helenka at an early age, and it’s a passion that has continued throughout her life. Her free time is spent enjoying the natural world, whether she is running, ski touring, cycling, trekking, or sailing through it.

Geneva has proved to be a pretty sweet location for Helenka, who is particularly grateful that – unlike in Canada – home, work, and the mountains are all within easy cycling distance of one another. But, like so many others, she had no intentions of staying long-term when she arrived here almost 20 years ago.

When she took up a summer job at CERN in 1990, her plan was to return to Montreal at the start of the next academic year and study meteorology. But after taking some of the summer courses on offer and delving into a few textbooks, the temptation to change direction was too much. “I really liked the mathematical aspect of particle physics – how the theory was so mathematically elegant,” she explains.

She started work on her PhD thesis, looking at charm physics with the OPAL experiment, later in 1990, but it wasn’t long before she had another reason to stick around: A fellow adventurer from Canton de Vaud who was soon to become her husband. Helenka got chatting to Chris at a party held on a boat on the lake in the summer of 1991.

“He had just got back from crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat. He told me his story, and I fell in love!” she laughs. Chris had made the epic journey on Aquarelle, a craft he’d borrowed from some friends for the purpose, and which would eventually become his and Helenka’s very own. It now spends most of the year moored at Martigues, near Marseille, but the couple like to sail with their children, Mila (8) and Dariusz (6) at least once a year.

“We brought them both on the boat right after they were born,” Helenka says, and as a result the children feel completely at home on the water. “They love to sail and the boat is a kind of little house for them,” she smiles.

Of course, not all of Helenka’s hobbies are compatible with family life and she misses the times she used to spend in the mountains trekking for days on end. She’s managed to come up with a time-efficient solution to scratch that particular itch however; she plans to take up fell running. “I really want to get back to the mountains,” she says, having already signed herself up for a 23 kilometre, 1000 metre ascent race which will take place south of Annecy this summer. This follows her first ever marathon, which she completed in Geneva last year, and for which she rather modestly reports a time of “oh… three hours and a quarter… something like that.”

The explorer in Helenka doesn’t only surface out- of-doors. At ATLAS she is involved in exotic physics, looking at what some consider one of the more implausible ideas – extra dimensions. On a more down-to-earth note, she also spends a lot of time doing what she describes as “work that’s useful to the collaboration” – the essential things that people tend to forget about. She helps keep an eye on how the software behaves after each nightly run; recently took part in a “bug-hunting campaign”, trawling through last year’s cosmic data looking for glitches; and spent much of last year working with a theorist on the PYTHIA data simulation code.

Although she’s currently on Sabbatical, there is a new adventure on the horizon for Helenka. “I’m usually with the French at LAPP Annecy, but now I’m half there and half with Montreal, because I’m planning on going to Canada for a few months.” The main draw is a change of scenery, but she is also keen to do some teaching while she’s there. The whole family will be onboard, including the kids. “I’ll either put them in school over there, or my mother’s a retired teacher,” she says with a smile, “so I’d just take all the homework they have and make my mother work!”

 

 

 

Ceri Perkins

ATLAS e-News