Denis Oliveira Damazio
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I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (and, since I am Brazilian, I write Brasil with "s" and not with "z" ;-). After spending a few years in Cabo Frio, a city in the interior of the state, I came back to the state capital to start my electronic engineering studies in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1993. There, I started working in 1997 with a group that collaborates with the development and prototype testing of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter.
By the end of 1999, I finally married my wife Paula and we came to live on the French/Switzerland border in the lovely town of Ferney-Voltaire. I spent almost two years working on the Tile Calorimeter data acquisition system and developing my thesis which consisted in applying different statistical techniques to the electron/pion/muon separation based on the information of the calorimeter itself. I returned to Brasil to present the thesis and get my doctoral degree, which happened by the end of 2002.
After finishing my Ph.D., I received a proposal from Brookhaven National Laboratory to develop a methodology to search for cosmic rays based on the reflected signals of distant radio stations in the ionization showers produced by highly energetic (more than 10^19 eV) cosmic rays. I worked on performing spectral analysis on the output of a radio receiver and trying to work out many different analysis in order to find cosmic -ray events. Due to the difficulty of cross checking these results with other types of results (coincidences are very unlikely), the project was briefly halted. By this time, I was working also with the Omega group which collaborated with ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter. By 2005, I was sent from BNL back to CERN to work on the installation, monitoring and maintenance of the LAr Calorimeter low voltage power supplies.
Following an established pattern, I started to work on a parallel task, my "dream" job, development of software for the High Level Trigger calorimeter algorithms. By the time I started to work in this project, there was a clear need for a code review, to separate the really necessary parts of the code from what was slowing down the whole processing. This code was finally adopted by all the calorimeter HLT algorithms. I am presently one of the two coordinators of the HLT Calorimeter group. We are now starting in the exciting phase of data acquisition with the LHC.
Since I was a little kid, I am completely committed to reading as many books as I could lay my hands on (even though I am not too much into classics). Presently, my preferred author is the only Portuguese Nobel Prize winner for literature, Jose Saramago. Two other passions are Brazilian music, like Elis Regina, Chico Buarque, Maria Rita, Adoniran Barbosa, and Marisa Monte, and cinema (I'm a particular fan of Alien, Matrix and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," the original text of Blade Runner).
In 2007, our son Lucca was born. My dear wife who has been following me all this time back and forth to Brasil, Ferney-Voltaire and Switzerland is now waiting for our daughter, to come sometime March, 2010.
