Q&A with new ATLAS Early Career Scientist Board member , Harish Potti
What is the board?
In the ATLAS collaboration, early career members make up more than 50% of the collaboration (>3000 out of ~ 5900 people). The Early Career Scientist Board (ECSB) is created to represent the best interests of the young scientists in the ATLAS collaboration. It is also a direct advisory group to the ATLAS collaboration board and the ATLAS management.
The ECSB consists of seven scientists at three career levels: doctoral students; post-doctoral scientists; junior academics and research staff. I am one of the seven scientists on this board.
How will you be involved?
In this role, I along with the other six ECSB members, represent the views and needs of the young scientists to the ATLAS collaboration board and the management. I also help in organizing various social events, software tutorials, and soft skills workshops.
Recently, we organized a program called ATLAS Meet & Eat, where we randomly match senior and junior members of the collaboration and invite them to meet over lunch/coffee either virtually or in person.
Together with the Early Career representatives from other LHC experiments (ALICE, CMS, and LHCb), I am currently helping in the organization of a soft-skills workshop titled "What I wish I knew when I was a Ph.D. student/postdoc". It will be held on June 17th and will be aimed at Ph.D. students and postdocs of all four major LHC experiments i.e., ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. Event website: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1154668/
To welcome new students and postdocs, we organize ATLAS Induction day every four months. I am helping in the organization of the next edition of this event which will happen on 27th June 2022. I am also giving a talk on “How to do an ATLAS analysis” at this event.
We also organize many other social events, and mentorship programs, as well as to conduct surveys, to gather feedback from the early-career scientists.
How did you achieve the appointment?
The ECSB members are selected using a two-step process: A collaboration-wide nominations are collected, then they are selected by a search committee. These selected members are confirmed when they receive an endorsement by the ATLAS collaboration board which consists of 192 ATLAS institutions. (Simple majority means just 92 votes).
When will your involvement begin/end
In March of this year, I was appointed as a member of the ATLAS experiment's Early Career Scientist Board for a term of two years. (i.e., till March 2024.)
What is your history with ATLAS?
I have been a member of the ATLAS experiment for the past 8 years. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, I was involved in the precision measurements of the Higgs boson and top quark. Since April 2021, I have been working as a postdoc at the University of Adelaide/CDMPP. I am currently involved in the combination of dark matter searches in invisible decays of the Higgs boson and the luminosity measurement using the pixel cluster