Sharing Science: An Afternoon at the Highland Park High School Science and Technology Fest

I was honored to be asked to be one of the many speakers this year at the Highland Park High School Science and Technology Fest. HPHS is just about a mile from SMU. I had the pleasure of giving a peek at the life of a particle physicist on the Large Hadron Collider to three periods of students, each audience consisting of about 30 students. The best part was the question and answer part of each 50 minute period. Students asked about how much science faculty get paid, whether or not you need to learn multiple languages just to go do research at CERN, and about how the trigger algorithms in the experiment work to identify interesting patterns and discard the ones deemed “uninteresting”.

It was a great afternoon, and I am very grateful to the organizers of the event for letting me be part of it this year. Here, in case anyone is interested, are my slides that were the backdrop to my presentation.