Barbara Warmbein

"Being involved in the ILC from almost the very beginning is both a great challenge and adventure." – Barbara Warmbein

Right after the Bangalore meeting on 15 March, a fourth ILC communicator joined the Global Design Effort. Barbara Warmbein will be sharing the European duties with Perrine Royole-Degieux and will closely collaborate with Elizabeth Clements (Americas) and Youhei Morita (Asia). She is based at DESY and is taking over for Karsten Büesser. As an ILC communicator, she will write stories for ILC NewsLine and take care of the general communications business – making sure that colleagues, decision makers and eventually the public will be well aware of the exciting studies and results in the ILC community. She will also be the scientific assistant to Brian Foster, regional GDE Director for Europe, based in Oxford, England.

Warmbein has a degree in literature and used to be a freelance journalist until she stumbled upon science journalism, spending the next two years in the press office at CERN. She wrote for the CERN Bulletin and helped organise a big science teaching festival, compiled a calendar for the Large Hadron Collider from the press officers' point of view – and learned how to make cheese fondue. (Sadly, she never learned how to ski.) She then moved to the Netherlands to work as a Scientific and Technical Editor for the European Space Agency (ESA) for five years, watching probes crash into planets, interviewing astronauts, getting to know about rocket science and making books, brochures, proceedings, posters, comics and all sorts of other publications.

"Naturally space research is also extremely exciting but somehow I have a soft spot for particle physics.", said Warmbein. "You get an instant ‘Wow!' when you talk about space, but people are often afraid of particle physics because they think they won't understand. And yet, the engineering of those amazing machines or the way scientists from all over the world work together to make physics happen can really ‘wow' people. Being involved from almost the very beginning in the ILC is both a great challenge and adventure."

Karsten Buesser, who has been the placeholder for Barbara since August 2005, has just resigned from his role as GDE communicator. "I thank you very much for your sterling work on communications, which I have greatly appreciated.", Foster wrote in an email to Buesser. "I look forward to continuing to work with you and support your nomination of Barbara." Buesser will continue his scientific activities within the ILC community, serving as scientific secretary for the EUROTeV (European Design Study Towards a Global TeV Linear Collider) project, being the Machine Detector Interface (MDI) contact of the LDC detector concept study and working on the MDI panel. Nevertheless, he will stay in close relation with GDE communication because he is a member of the European ILC Outreach Committee which supports the European GDE communication, works on European ILC communication plans and prepares European ILC Outreach events.

-- Perrine Royole-Degieux

Poster: Standard Model

The poster that returned… "While I was still at university, in Hamburg, I knew a few people at DESY, and on one of my visits I nicked a poster of the Standard Model from one of the offices. I suppose I thought it was exotic then, quarks and gluons and all that, and wanted to impress my fellow literature students, not thinking that I'd ever really use it. But it travelled with me to Geneva, where I needed it many times to check Standard Model facts, and it moved to my office wall in the Netherlands. It's now in one of my boxes and will get a prominent place in my new office, where I will certainly need it again many times for reference and hope that the original owner will not come back to claim it!" -- Barbara Warmbein