Biography:
Pauline Gagnon was born in Chicoutimi in Quebec, Canada in 1955. After teaching physics for a few years in local colleges, she moved to California, where, she first studied at San Francisco State University then completed a PhD in particle physics at University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993. She then started her research activities at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva, with Carleton University then became Senior Research Scientist at Indiana University until she retired in 2016. Within the ATLAS Collaboration, she searched for dark matter in the decays of the Higgs boson and for hypothetical dark photons. From 2011 until 2014, she worked within the CERN Communication group, writing blogs for the Quantum Diaries and answering questions from numerous media worldwide. Explaining particle physics in simple and accessible terms has become her trademark. Since 2013, she has given more than sixty presentations to large audiences in seven countries. She wrote a popular science book on particle physics: Who Cares about Particle Physics: Making Sense of the Higgs boson, the LHC and CERN in the hope to reach even larger audiences since particle physics is too much fun to leave it only to physicists!
