Loreto Letterkenny student Siobhán O’Brien has been selected as an ambassador for Ireland at the CERN-Solvay student camp in Geneva.
Siobhán, a fifth year pupil, is one of just 30 young scientists of the future attending the camp at the CERN European Organisation for Nuclear Research – one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research and home of the Large Hadron Collider.
Siobhán will jet off for Switzerland tomorrow to spend a week attending lectures, completing group projects, visiting the research facilities and labs, meeting some of the foremost scientists from around the world… and hopefully having fun as well!
Siobhán, who is a former student of St. Baithin’s National School in St. Johnston, always had an interest in Physics and especially the research being carried out at CERN.
She is the daughter of Mary and Robert O’Brien from Glenswilly.
She is a strong advocate for women in STEM and promote this ideal at every opportunity. Siobhán won the Bronze medal in the Physics Olympiad in DCU in November 2023 and is also studying Computer Science in Loreto and Applied Maths after school in St. Eunan’s College.
“I’m so grateful to my teachers, who support and encourage me to continually push the boundaries for girls and women in the areas of science and technology,” she said.
Expressing her privilege to be chosen for the camp, she said: “I believe CERN to be one of the most influential, if not the most influential physics research centre in the world. Their work helps to uncover what the universe is made of and how it works, pushing the boundaries of our own human knowledge, and are even responsible for developing the World Wide Web and the Grid. The Grid harnesses the power of computers around the world to process vast amounts of data collected by Large Hadron Collider Experiments, totalling 1.5 exabytes of storage, which is equal to 1.5 billion Gigabytes of data.
“I’m delighted that Ireland has applied for Associate Member status with CERN last year. With CERN membership, Irish citizens will gain access to CERN’s formal training schemes, which will include PhD programmes, apprenticeships, a graduate engineering training programme, and internships for computer scientists and engineers. CERN currently has 23 Full Member states, and 11 Associate Member States. It is hoped that Ireland will become an associate member by the end of this year.”
