women-academics-from-algeria

"This is an individual award, but my work was achieved as a team."

"Without resources, no budget, no vehicles."

"For various reasons medicine didn’t quite work out for me, so I started to study fundamental physics which I loved very much."

"We are all certainly hoping to find something interesting in the data."

"Two tricks that always help me are first to break down my plan into many small tasks that can be accomplished in short periods of time. For example if I have to give a big talk on a subject that I not as familiar with, then I find a list of papers that I want to read, and I read one paper a day. This helps me make the project tangible and less scary. Instead of ‘God, I have to give a huge talk!’, I have transformed the problem into ‘I need to read these 10 papers.’. In this way as well, I can easily measure my progress and the obstacle feels less daunting."

"life was very difficult. We worked under extremely harsh conditions in a territory the size of a country."

"Who writes reference letters for young women should make sure that they promote all the skills and not only her soft skills."

"I arrived in France in 1999 to start medicine."

"The main goal of our experiment is to study the difference between matter and anti-matter but also to look for signs of what we call physics beyond the Standard Model."

"It’s hard to predict if we are going to find new things or not."

"Far from what I had experimented in medical studies, we shared notes between students when one of us was sick."

"First, I sleep on it and let the subconscious do its great work. Then, I sit down and try to break down the obstacle into smaller parts. I try to explore if there are other paths around the obstacle, ones that I haven’t thought about. For big obstacles, after I have drafted a plan, I always call a close colleague, someone that I trust, to run it by them. Often the situation might be much clearer from a more distant perspective. These chats help me sound out if there is an obvious path that I have missed or maybe I am too emotionally involved in obstacle to see the solution clearly."

"I was never drawn to management. Since there aren’t enough executives, researchers in our countries are called on to take on various responsibilities."

"That’s how I accepted to be the Park’s director, a position that was far from easy."

"It starts with children, how they are raised and educated."

"When a physicist does his analysis, he will."

"Scheduling meetings after 17:00 will invertibility discriminate against young mothers and therefore should be avoided."

"I was born and raised in Algiers, in high school I was in “Sciences Exact."

"I was a post-doc in EPFL."

"I am a member of the LHCb experiment. *Its one of the four experiments on the LHC ring at CERN."

"My institute indeed participated in the discovery of many particles since it was created in the fifties."

"Right now we are in a phase of data taking at the LHC."

"I arrived in France at the beginning of classes."

"I liked particle physics, I liked the idea to reveal secrets of the world."

"She was fascinated by teachers, who were often teachers researchers with thrilling discussions, most of all when you want to work in research."

"I did a three-years post-PhD contract at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne"

"The second trick is that I keep a small notebook with a list of success that I am proud of. So many times I find that I can recall of my failures or embarrassing moments in an instant. In contrast, all of my successes seem easily forgotten. When I find myself overwhelmed in a moment of panic, this list helps me remind myself of all the tough things that I have successfully overcome in the past. I tell myself - you did it then, you can do it now. Don’t be discouraged."

"I was first deputy director, then director. But in fact, that’s not at all what I wanted to do."

"When there are only five or six prehistorians for all of Algeria, for example, there is everything to do at once."

"The Park’s headquarters had just been moved to Djanet, and the officials who had been running the Park did not want to go there."

"I have done research mainly between France and Switzerland."

"I interact with people across the world."

"The stigma that girls are not good at Math starts when they are tiny."

"The language we use is important, still today I hear statements like"

"The people in charge have the responsibility to create an environment where all voices, even the less loud ones can express themselves and their ideas."

"Parental leaves should be respected and the responsibilities of women who return after a leave should be restored to them."

"I stop here, but there is so much more to say on this topic."

"I feel very proud. Especially for my family who was always supportive of my work."

"I did the equivalent of bachelor and master."

"I did a PhD in particle physics between 2006 and 2009."

"I was partly based at CERN."

"In 2012 I got a job in CNRS where I am now a “chargé de recherche."

"The Standard Model is today somehow the best description that we have of the fundamentals laws of nature."

"What is interesting is that while this model is very powerful and predictive it fails to explain some aspects for nature such as dark matter."

"I think it’s important to emphasise the collaborative aspect of these discoveries in particular in the collider physics."

"The facilities and detector which were and will be built are gigantic and they need the association of many institutes in many countries."

"I work on what we call in particle physics the 'standard model."

"I liked big machines such as scanners."

"I finally found a place to stay, I was already lagging."

"Everything had to be done. As a result, the task and responsibility were enormous."