Women In Technology - Friday Links - 12/01/2024

Hello everyone, and happy new year!

We hope you enjoyed a fun and restful break, and we’re excited to welcome you back for another year of interesting and friendly WIT activities.

Many of our community members must have used the holidays to catch up on their reading (and gaming, and museum visiting…), because this week we are bringing you a fully crowd-sourced set of links suggested by our colleagues!  If you’d like to share a story with us, don’t hesitate to send it to us via email, or share it directly with the WIT community on our Mattermost channel.   Keep scrolling for a selection of upcoming events, including one for our colleagues in the USA, a call for volunteers, an opportunity for summer students, and some job opportunities in IT.   

Finally, please take note of our upcoming WIT annual review, Thursday, February 1 at 12:00.  If your New Year’s resolution is to get more involved, this is a great opportunity to learn more about WIT and the volunteer opportunities that we offer, and to provide feedback on our activities.  We have also created a brief survey, which we invite you to complete here: https://forms.office.com/e/Qnzqjgc0B6.  This survey is anonymous; although you must log in with your CERN account, this will not be associated with your response.  Please reply to the survey no later than Friday, January 26 so that we can use your feedback as input to the annual review.   

Wishing you an excellent 2024,

WIT SC

Image: “Nos éclaireuses”, a painting by French artist Amélie Beaury-Saurel, representing seven pioneers: Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (poet), Hélène Dutrieu (pilot), Suzanne Grumberg (lawyer), Mme Henri Rochefort, née Marguerite Vervoort (painter). A female driver ("cochère") and a cyclist are also represented.  

Women Masters 

If you are planning to be in Madrid between now and February 4, don’t miss Women Masters: an art exhibit of works by women who were "celebrated artists in their lifetimes who are now enjoying renewed recognition in response to their erasure from the art-historical account alongside others who broke moulds with creations of undoubted excellence.  Featuring nearly 100 works, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper and textiles, the exhibition is curated from a feminist viewpoint by Rocío de la Villa. It presents a survey from the late 16th century to the early decades of the 20th century through eight contexts important within women’s path towards emancipation.”

Diversity at NASA

NASA needs sharper diversity focus to boost representation, audit finds.  "NASA has made little progress in increasing the representation of women and minorities in its civilian workforce or leadership ranks.”  The full report is available here.

For the board game lovers

If you’re searching for some educational family entertainment for these chilly winter evenings, have a look at HerStory: the family board game of remarkable women!  "In HerStory, you're an acclaimed author, writing a book to tell the stories of remarkable women of history. Players take turns doing research, drafting chapters, and completing them for points and possibly for research symbols or special powers. The game ends when a player has written eight chapters, and the player with the highest scoring book wins.”

New at the CERN Library: Feminist AI

"Feminist AI" brings together leading feminist thinkers from across the disciplines to explore the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and related data-driven technologies on human society.

Science Gateway Training for WIT (Thursday, January 18)

There are still a few places remaining in this special dedicated training session for the community to learn more about Science Gateway Labs. The training would allow you to learn the "Seeing the invisible" workshop for which you can then become an official guide.  To learn more and register, visit https://indico.cern.ch/event/1348790/. 

Volunteers wanted for the Third Collisions event!  (February 9-11)

We are excited to invite you to volunteer for the upcoming Third Collisions event from February 9th to 11th, 2024.

The event (taking place every 3 years) will bring together up to 700 CERN alumni and CERN Members of Personnel (and their guests) and promises a unique experience including inspiring keynote talks, networking sessions, career opportunities at the jobs fair, CERN visits, a gala dinner and awards ceremony and much more.  And we hope you can be a part of it!

Here are more details about volunteering:

There are various roles we need to fill, including managing the registration desk, assisting with the flow of visitors, coordinating buses for experimental visits, packing the goodie bags, hosting an information stand, basic support in the conference rooms used for the parallel sessions,..

We understand that your schedules are busy, so please feel free to volunteer as much as your agenda allows.

We will need volunteers to be available at some point during the following times (each slot is approx. 4 hours) :

Thursday 14:00 – 17:30

Friday 8:00 – 20:00

Saturday 8:00 – 22:00

Sunday 8:30 – 12:30

Training sessions will be organised on 17 and 18 January at 17:00.

As a token of our appreciation, volunteers will have the opportunity to attend the entire event (which normally costs 95 CHF) , including talks (excluding the times during which you are on volunteer duty). Additionally, you'll have access to the welcome reception and gala dinner.

If you're available and interested, please reply to [email protected] with your availability.

Thank you very much for considering our invitation to volunteer, Alumni Collisions events would not be possible without the dedication of a fantastic team of volunteers like yourselves 😊 and we look forward to working together to make Third Collisions a resounding success.

Mid-Act Workshop for Mid-Career Women in Large Physics Collaborations (March 1-2, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA)

Mid-career women in physics collaborations face strikingly similar challenges across different collaborations and subfields in particle physics, nuclear physics, and astronomy. University of Tennessee (UT) faculty and partners have developed a pilot workshop to get to the root of these challenges and find solutions to mitigate them.

With an emphasis on recruiting at the student level there's been a slow increase in the number of early-career women in physics. As they enter the mid-career  stage, however, they encounter challenges for which they have no training and often lack a professional support system.

The Mid-Act workshop will explore systemic issues that cause women to abandon leadership positions (or leave the field completely), as well as common root causes of hurdles mid-career women face in leadership roles across different physics collaborations and subfields. The project will explore potential mitigation strategies and engage social science faculty as workshop facilitators. This is the first systematic look at evaluating and documenting the issues mid-career women in physics encounter and making community recommendations.

If you would like to participate, please visit http://www.phys.utk.edu/midact2024/.     

Travel support will be provided and childcare support is available.

CERN Summer Student Programme

The CERN Summer Student Programme for Bachelor and Master students in Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, or Mathematics is currently accepting applications!  To learn more about this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend a summer at CERN, and to apply for the programme, visit https://careers.cern/summer.  Application deadline: January 31.  Please share with students in your networks!  

Job postings

The Compute and Devices Group in the CERN IT Department has two job openings; please share with your colleagues!  The deadline for both positions is January 19.

• Graduate: DevOps Engineer for WLCG Experiments Test Framework (ETF) and HammerCloud 
• Staff: High Throughput Compute Services Engineer for HTC batch system.