LHCb Early Career, Gender and Diversity Office

What are we here for?

To quote from the LHCb constitution,

The Early Career, Gender and Diversity (ECGD) Office oversees the well-being and working environment of all LHCb members.

We are here for all issues related to gender and diversity and to the needs of our colleagues at an early career stage. In particular, we deal with issues related to any type of indirect or direct discrimination, be it on grounds of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, creed, cultural background or other factors. Please contact us if you have experienced or witnessed any type of discrimination or harassment or any inappropriate behaviour in conflict with the LHCb Code of Conduct. While we offer a confidential conversation, we note that it may be necessary to break this confidentiality if the conversation reveals severe and immediate potential dangers to yourself or others.

We organize plenary meetings at every LHCb collaboration week and we advertise news and activities related to ECGD issues through this web page and through emails to the collaboration. Please help us help you by letting us know of your concerns and by pointing us to relevant news, events and resources.

Who are we?

The ECGD office is composed of two senior ECGD officers, Sneha Malde and Michael Winn and two early career representatives, Lorenzo Paolucci and Eliot Walton.

ECGD officers

The two ECGD officers are appointed for a two-year term by the LHCb management and endorsed by the Collaboration Board. ECGD officers are usually "seniorish" members of the collaboration, with long-term work contracts, to make sure we can act independently and are not easily intimidated.

Michael started his term in December 2024, while Sneha started in October 2023.
To contact us, for instance if you are in need of specific help and for any confidential matters please use our personal email addresses, Sneha.malde@physics.ox.ac.uk (Sneha) and/or michael.winn@cern.ch (Michael). We will be happy to arrange for a call or a meeting with you. We also have a list of volunteers who are willing to help in the Geneva area. For general messages, you can also reach us at the generic email address lhcb.ecgd@cern.ch. Messages to this email address are received by the four members of the ECGD office. They will be archived and accessible by our successors.

You can find a list of all ECGD officers and their terms of office here.

Early-career representatives

Since December 2020, two early-career representatives are elected by the LHCb early-career community for a one-year term, which is automatically extensible for another year. Their appointment is ratified by the Collaboration Board. They assist the ECGD officers and take care of the particular needs of the early-career community. The first early-career representatives, were appointed in December 2020. The current early-career representatives are Piera Battista, since March 2025 and Eliot Walton, since March 2024. Previous post holders include Lorenzo Paolucci, Tara Nanut Petrič, Igor Kostiuk, Sara Celani, Martha Hilton, and Guillaume Pietrzyk.

For any early-career related matters please use our personal email addresses piera.battista@cern.ch (Piera) and/or eliot.jane.walton@cern.ch (Eliot). We also receive messages sent to the generic email address lhcb.ecgd@cern.ch.

The LHCb early-career community

Belonging to the LHCb early-career commnutiny is a matter of self definition. The community includes all the LHCb members who are subscribed to the e-group lhcb-early-career. By default, postdocs, PhD students and Bachelor students are automatically subscibed. LHCb members who do not belong to these categories and would like to join the community should subscribe to the e-group lhcb-early-career-subscribe. On the contrary, those who would like not to belong to the early-career commnutiny can simply subscribe to e-group lhcb-early-career-unsubscribe.
To do these actions, please connect to the e-groups webpage and search for e-group names that begin with lhcb-early-career. You may then use the subscribe button near the corresponding e-group.

The Laura Bassi Initiative

The Laura Bassi initiative was set-up in 2019 to bring together LHCb colleagues interested in tackling the underrepresentation of women in HEP, to promote discussion and ideas on related issues and to provide an informal network to colleagues. While the group is aimed primarily at junior women and under-represented genders it is open to anyone interested in tackling issues of underrepresentation in HEP. Meetings are held during collaboration weeks. While the Laura Bassi initiative is independent of the LHCb ECGD office, with a focus on junior-led initiaves, the two groups often discuss similar topics.

The Laura Bassi initiative has a mattermost group and an email list (LHCb-LauraBassi-initiative@cern.ch).

The Laura Bassi initiative is currently coordinated by Anja Beck and Janina Nicolini. Between 2019-2023 the initiative was coordinated by Eluned Smith.