Ingrid Gregor
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I can pin point the moment when I first got infected with the high energy physics virus very well. That was in 1995 when I traveled to CERN for the first time. I went down to the DELPHI cavern and saw my first high energy physics experiment. It was love at first sight. But how did I get there?
I was born in 1968 in a small town in Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany. After finishing school in 1987, I spend 15 months in Vancouver, Canada, to improve my English and see the world. In order to eat and keep a roof over my head, I worked as an au-pair for a very nice family in North Vancouver. After my return to Germany in 1989, I decided to study Physics Engineering at the University of Wuppertal. I was looking for a field of study with a wide variety but without a very long program. In 1994, when I received my diploma, I realized that the jobs on the market are not as interesting as the studies themselves. So I decided to become a "real" physicist and spend some more time in lectures while working in parallel on the DELPHI VFT, one of the first larger pixel detectors in high energy physics. With a detour over medical applications during my second diploma thesis I went to ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider to work on my PhD (optical links, very fancy at that time).
In 2001, I defended my thesis and started to look for a job, of course in particle physics. With LEP being turned off and LHC still far away, I decided to go to HERA at DESY, at that time the only larger running particle physics accelerator in Europe. In the beginning of 2002, I finally left Wuppertal and moved to work at DESY Zeuthen directly outside of Berlin. I joined the Hermes group and we built the Hermes Recoil Detector in the next three years. As soon that was done, I moved to Hamburg to join the Zeus Collaboration. In June 2007, after 15 years of data taking ZEUS and HERA were turned off, I moved on to detectors for the proposed Linear Collider. Within the EUDET consortium, we built a pixel beam telescope. The telescope provides the detector R&D groups with an excellent tool, which made this a very fun project for me. I also get to know many people from the whole particle physics community and work with a very nice team. In addition, I started to work on detector R&D for a possible upgrade of the ATLAS Pixel Detector for the LHC.
Besides all the work, I still have a life. I like to travel, especially to the south of Brazil, spending time with friends and family. If I’m not traveling, I like to read adventure books or criminal stories.
