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Read my bio in French.
Read my bio in German.
For 20 years now I have lived in Paris, where I arrived as an au pair after high school. I grew up in Germany, in Rheinweiler, a little village between the Rhine and the Black Forest. In the beginning, I stayed in Paris because I wanted to live with my boyfriend, an American musician and painter, then because I had a permanent position as a physicist, and, after all, because I like living in Paris.
 After my university studies at Jussieu - Paris VI, I started working at LPNHE where I prepared my PhD on the H1 experiment at DESY, Hamburg. Not only my scientific interests motivated this choice, but also because I liked getting in touch again with Germany. In the beginning of my PhD, I still played Melodica in my boyfriend’s band, but the frequent traveling to Hamburg was incompatible with regular rehearsals and I got fired. Three years later, we split and today I’m taking care of his website.
Professionally, I first studied the proton structure function: The proton is made of quarks and gluons, and our measurements allow us to know its composition in more detail. In 1996, events at very high energy were observed by the HERA experiments with a higher rate than expected. Such excess in the event rate can indicate the signature of some new particles or a new kind of interaction. We, a French-German-English group, made a precision measurement of the event rates over a longer data-taking period. This has been very exciting, even if the publication after three years of work has shown that this excess has been most likely a statistical fluctuation – however we’ve learnt a lot of other things about the proton.
 After contacts have been established with the Fermilab experiments in 1997, several French laboratories joined DØ for the second phase of data taking, the Run II that started in April 2001. In our lab, we first worked on the commissioning of the liquid Argon calorimeter, which is used to measure the energy of the particles produced in the proton-antiproton interaction. Currently I am co-convener of the “calorimeter algorithms” group. Its task is to improve the software that identifies and reconstructs the particles detected in the calorimeter. I am also supervising a student who is preparing his PhD measuring the production rate of top-antitop quarks.
 To celebrate the year 2000 I started taking ballet classes, but I also like ice-skating, horse riding and skiing, even though I’ve never done one of them regularly. I like reading very much. One of my favorite authors these days is Haruki Murakami and I’ve lately seen a marvelous theater adaptation of “The Elephant Vanishes”. Through an exhibition in the Centre Pompidou, I discovered the work of Sophie Calle, and sometimes I would really like to do such things myself. I like movies, seeing friends and renovating houses and I’m interested these days in psychology. It’s not always easy to keep a balance between work and the rest of life, but being curious helps a lot.
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