Special moments in 2020

24 DECEMBER,2020 | By Markus Brugger

Over the past days we could enjoy the large diversity of the group, being well bound together by the many transversal activities, respective synergies, and your excellent collaborative spirit. The EA group would not be the very same without the many traditions we cherish and for which I would like to thank you for. COVID clearly made it difficult, but a bit of creativity and your positive spirit led to quite a compilation of special moments, communicative or festive we shared together.

We started 2020 by tweaking a little bit the building 530 tradition of placing a new group picture in our coffee room every ten years, an occasion to also celebrate Lau’s special birthday. Little time after, I was unfortunately ill, thus could not join the very distinct coffee meeting you had prepared for me, nevertheless very much enjoying the great pictures and cake, thanking you all for the great idea and initiative! Farewells were duly celebrated, e.g., Fiona’s hobbit-style end-of-fellowship event, at least before meeting restrictions came into place. Saying this, COVID came and while facing a number of challenges, we had to look into new ways of staying connected: the daily virtual coffee room as a common meeting point (complemented by a number of individual ones I was told ), the individual discussions I enjoyed having with each one of you, and staying with coffee meetings, while w/o your beloved coffee, juices and treats, we still managed to meet together through zoom for a total of seven occasions with excellent contributions sharing some highlights from your various activities and achievements. Furthermore, secrete recipes where unveiled at the occasion of our traditional Paella or Glogg events where Francisco and Mats let us spend time together through zoom and hoping for a 2021 revival in person.

Let me thus close this Advent challenge by coming back to the magic of CERN and our group. Throughout the Advent stories we discussed the various activities and projects across our group, contributing to CERN’s science as an extraordinary human endeavour. Our understanding of nature at the fundamental level has reached astounding results and this very complexity of science requires a combined effort of technology, experiments, and theory. CERN is a superb example of this combined effort at work, illustrated by the daily examples we could share throughout the last 24 days. The scientific success of CERN belongs to all of you and I sincerely thank you for keeping up this spirit and being part of the Experimental Area Group.

I wish you and your closest excellent end-of-year celebrations, a well-earned restful period and all the best for 2021.