Students from Newham Collegiate Sixth Form Centre have been inspired by a visit to CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider.

During the visit on 18^th September, the students discovered how CERN is helping to answer some of the most fundamental questions; how did the Universe begin? What are the basic building blocks of matter?

Scientific breakthroughs such as the discovery of the Higgs boson require experimental machines on the large scale and the students gained an appreciation of the technical and engineering challenges that the multinational experimental collaborations at CERN face.

Ms Palmer (teacher of chemistry) from The NCS said, ‘It was wonderful for our students to see first hand not only how anti-matter was generated at CERN, but also how multi-disciplined the science taking place was. Our students left inspired to pursue their own careers and studies in STEM subjects.’

The UK has been a member of CERN since the organisation was founded in 1954.  Membership allows British researchers to take a wide variety of roles that contribute to CERN’s on-going success; from recently qualified technicians and university undergraduates gaining their first taste of working in an international environment to PhD students analysing experimental data and experienced engineers and physicists leading projects or representing their experimental collaborations.  The NCS students’ visit was led by a member of the CERN community who talked from personal experience about their contribution to CERN’s research programme.

STFC’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Brian Bowsher said “The scale of the science and technology at CERN is awe-inspiring.  There is no doubt that seeing it at first hand and meeting the people who work on the experiments, can influence young people’s future education and career choices.”

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