INTERN PROFILE Formula for success


To say senior Barbara Skrzypeck had the experience of a lifetime last summer may be an understatement. Skrzypeck, a physics and mathemat- ics major, spent time with the world’s leading scientists in Geneva, Swit- zerland, at the European Organiza- tion for Nuclear Research, known as CERN—the birthplace of the World Wide Web. She was one of only 17 U.S. undergraduate students chosen for the prestigious research program.


What attracted you to this internship?


First, I wanted to get a taste of


high-energy physics because most of the work I do here at Loyola is theoretical and research-based. Second, it’s CERN. It’s the center of experimental high energy physics, and it’s known for the Higgs boson, which won the Nobel Prize in Phys- ics in 2013. CERN is a place where you have a collaboration of scien- tists from all over the world. I was really excited to be a part of that.


What did you work on at CERN? I worked on the ATLAS project,


which is one of the experiments currently running at CERN. It’s an experimental collaboration that looks at proton-proton collisions. I was working on modifying the particle flow algorithm that aims to improve jet reconstruction in the ATLAS detector. My job was to look at one part of the algorithm, which is traffic extrapolation, and to try to find a way to make it more efficient.


What’s something interesting you learned there? I discovered what working in


experimental physics looks like: It was a lot of collaboration. I gave six presentations over two months, and most of those were to the particle flow community and the ATLAS group. I was able to see


SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK


Granting aid to underserved communities


Thanks to grants totaling more than $3 million, the School of Social Work is launch- ing two initiatives aimed at recruiting, educating, and train- ing a diverse group of students to provide mental health and substance abuse services to underserved populations. A grant of $2.6 million from


the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, over the next four years will support the Pathways to Aca- demic Career and Employment Success scholarship program. This program, which more than 100 graduate students are expected to participate in by 2020, will allow the School of Social Work to recruit a more diverse student base that will be trained in behavioral and mental health clinical social work practices to work in medi- cally underserved communities. The school was also awarded


how the work of experimentalists is highly interactive and collaborative.


How do you think this internship will help you in your career? It’s opened up a lot of opportuni-


ties for me in experimental physics. And particle physics is something that I am now pursuing as I look at grad schools. Beforehand I didn’t have as much research experience outside of Loyola. Now, I have a taste of various other aspects of physics that I didn’t know about before.


What was your favorite part of working at CERN?


I really enjoyed getting to know


the scientists. Also, learning about high-energy physics and the techni- cal aspects of the detector. During lunch breaks, everyone would go out and talk about physics. Unlike going to class for an hour, I had a dif- ferent kind of exposure by interact- ing with scientists.


If you could work on any physics experiment, what would it be?


That’s a really hard question.


Ideally I’d like to contribute to theory and experiment. For the time being, I’d love to go back to CERN. I’ve gotten really interested in what I learned there, and there’s still so much more to learn.


$870,000 by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The funding will be used to train students, faculty, and field edu- cators in the School of Social Work—in collaboration with the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing and the Stritch School of Medicine—to use a model designed to reduce the impact of substance abuse and mental illness upon marginalized com- munities. The team is expected to train more than 3,500 stu- dents and health professionals over the next three years.


LEARN MORE LUC.edu/socialwork


WINTER 2017 7


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