The ILC Reference Design Report companion document, Gateway to the Quantum Universe played a symbolic role for CERN’s Jean-Luc Baldy as he passed the torch to John Osborne, also from CERN, during the ALCPG07 workshop at Fermilab this week. For the past two years, Baldy served as one of the Conventional Facilities & Siting group leaders for the Global Design Effort. He retires later this year, and the ALCPG workshop marks the official transition from Baldy to Osborne. “In the time that Jean-Luc was part of the GDE, we completed our baseline design and reference design for the ILC,” said GDE Director Barry Barish. “His contributions to the CFS group helped us reach these two important milestones, and we will miss his wisdom and resourceful problem-solving skills.”

John Osborne took over officially from Jean-Luc Baldy at ALCPG.

Baldy joined the ILC in August 2005 during the Snowmass workshop. With the exception of his colleague at CERN, Jean-Pierre Delahaye, he recalls not knowing anybody else at the 600-person GDE kick-off workshop in Snowmass, Colorado. This quickly changed though as he joined the other two CFS leaders Vic Kuchler from Fermilab and Atsushi Enomoto from KEK. “I really enjoyed being part of the CFS team and working with my counterparts,” he said. “There is a lot of good team spirit between us.”

After more than 26 years as a civil engineer at CERN, Baldy admits that it was a difficult decision to retire. The temptation to rekindle his lost hobbies, however, won him over. Photography, astronomy, travel, tennis and hiking are just a few of the things on his list. Baldy, whose photographs have appeared in exhibitions in Europe before, explained that he enjoys taking pictures of everything, but his real passion is capturing live action images of people moving. His camera will certainly join him on the trips he would like to take to such exotic places as Polynesia, Tahiti, Vietnam and Cambodia. “I really look forward to traveling without the stress of having to prepare a PowerPoint presentation while on the plane,” he said.

Osborne has been under Baldy's tutelage now for nine years at CERN. Over the past two years, Baldy kept Osborne informed about the ILC's activities. “I am very thankful to Jean-Luc for managing the path to take over,” Osborne said. The only problem as Osborne sees it is that he will now lose all of his hobbies. “Goodbye rugby and cricket; hello PowerPoint presentations,” he said.

-- Elizabeth Clements