Monica Dunford

Monica Dunford is a researcher at the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. She studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine and as a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. For the first part of her career, Monica studied the properties on neutrinos, working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which was located 6,800 feet underground in an active nickel mine in Ontario, Canada.

After completing her doctorate, Monica was awarded the Enrico Fermi Fellowship at the University of Chicago and moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work on the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). She worked actively during the commissioning of the detector to bring it into operation for the long awaited ‘first beam’ at the LHC.

Monica has enthusiastically blogged about her experiences on ATLAS for the US LHC blog site and has been filmed frequently for TV programs including 60 Minutes and the Discovery Channel. She has recently appeared in Particle Fever, a full feature film about particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider.