Students at the Forefront of Science

Fall 2022

Internships within the largest international scientific collaboration in history inspire our students to grow and contribute

This year, three AUB students joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics research facility, to complete their internships in software development, engineering, and project management, contributing to studying the basic constituents of matter and exploring the fundamental laws of nature.

“One of the many reasons I chose CERN is to surround myself with smart and brilliant people, since I believe that this is the perfect environment for a motivated and ambitious student to learn, develop, and grow,” said Sara Abbas.

The students are all majoring in computer and communications engineering at the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture. They worked within CERN, which consists of a unique general-purpose particle detector that allows scientists and engineers to make new discoveries and identify new phenomena that can ultimately help answer questions related to what the universe is made of and how it works.

Jaafar Alawieh shared that his motivation for participating in this internship stemmed from CERN’s reputation in the region as an international collaboration hub for experts on the topic of nuclear research and all discoveries that may stem from it. “The potential to work at CERN presented itself to me as a chance to learn from some of the most qualified technical minds in my field,” he said.

This internship program is part of a long-term partnership between Lebanon and CERN that began in 2016 with the signing of an International Cooperation Agreement. AUB joined as a cooperating institute in CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment in 2018.

Zein Zebib said that the main thing that attracted him to the internship was the project management work for the High-Performance Computing for Lebanon (HPC4L) facility: one of the CMS projects that was initiated to build Lebanon’s research capacity while contributing as a Tier-2 center to the analysis of CMS data.

“With everything happening in Lebanon, I felt powerless, and this job gave me the opportunity to give back and help the country I love by promoting innovation and scientific discovery,” Zebib said.