Outreach

As a physicist I strongly believe outreach is part of our duties to correctly inform people of our goals, how we plan to achieve them and, last but not least, how careful we are about safety in our experiments. It’s beneficial for both the audience and us. Below you can find some of my recent outreach activities. For some of them you can click the cover slide of my talks to have more information or watch some local-TV interviews I gave in Italy.

SCHOOL ACTIVITIES

• I was referee at the District 58 science fair, O’Neill Middle School – Downers Grove, IL(USA), January 2015;
• Since 2016 I have worked with 3 high schools in Italy, Liceo Scientifico and Classico of Cervinara “Francesco De Sanctis“, Liceo Scientifico “Enrico Fermi“ of Montesarchio and Liceo Scientifico “Rummo“ of Benevento. Some of the lectures/talks I gave:
  1. “Physics of the fundamental interactions” and “High Energy Physics” – two 90-minute training courses aimed at high school professors in the province of Benevento, December 2016;
  2. “From the God particle to the pulse of the Universe, a travel through Space-Time“ – three 90-minute seminars on the two Nobel discoveries of Gravitational Waves and the Higgs Boson, December 2016, February 2017 and May 2017;
  3. “The Fall of Classical Physics” – two 90-minute lectures aimed at high-school students on modern searches in physics, December 2017;
  4. “From Democritus’ atom to particle physics” – two 90-minute lectures in a multicultural project I was in with prof. Felicia Valente from the schools in Cervinara, March 2019.

CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

• “From the God particle to the pulse of the Universe, a travel through Space-Time” cultural colloquium at
  1. the editorial room of the periodical “Il Caudino – L’informazione della Valle Caudina“, Cervinara (Italy), May 2017;
  2. St Catherine’s College, Oxford (UK), May 2017;
  3. Hanrott’s – private event organised by Martha and Robert Hanrott, Washington D.C. (USA), April 2019. I met Martha and Robert in 2018 during a tour at CERN. They appreciated the tour and invited me to give a talk during a private event in the USA. It was a great experience. They were wonderful hosts, I really felt home! Robert has a degree in Modern History from Oxford University and runs the Epicurus Today blog, while Martha has a PhD in Economics and was as an economist with the World Bank in Washington D.C. Having a smaller audience gave me the possibly to receive and reply to many questions. I really loved the dinner format!

CERN ACTIVITIES

• I am an official ATLAS and SM18 (Magnets area) outreach tour guide. I show students/people the magic behind the scenes of the ATLAS detector – ATLAS Control Room and ATLAS cavern – and of CERN;
• I was invited by the ATLAS spokesperson and the CERN Protocol Office to represent the young community during the visit to CERN of the (at that time) UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Hon. Boris Johnson, January 2017, and of Dr Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, January 2018, along with the CERN director and the ATLAS spokesperson.