Kathrin Goldammer (Germany)
| Hi! My name is Kathrin Goldammer and I am in the midst of finishing my PhD in physics. I work at a particle accelerator lab in Berlin. |  |
I live in one of the coolest cities in the world: Berlin. It's funny how my job has taken me to so many other great places lately: San Francisco, Tokyo, half of Germany and Europe but I tend to like Berlin best. It's probably because we have an endless lot of music, nightlife and culture in this city and because I live in the heart of it all: Berlin Kreuzberg.
Luckily, Berlin also has a synchrotron light source called BESSY II which is where I work. It is basically a circular particle accelerator for electrons. The electrons travel with almost the speed of light and emit radiation, called synchrotron radiation, which is used in a wide range of scientific experiments. For instance, it can be used to study materials and chemical reactions, and it is used for the development of nanotechnological components, magnetic hard disks for computers and many other things.
At BESSY, I work in a team that is designing a new accelerator. We hope to build it next year. It is a Free Electron Laser, a new kind of light source complementing the BESSY II ring. I am enjoying my job a lot, and one reason is that the world of particle accelerators is simply so amazing. Everything is either on the very large scale (the BESSY ring is 240 m long, one giant lightbulb - and at CERN in Geneva they even have a 27 km long accelerator!) or on the utmost short end of the scale (the laser pulses we want to produce are roughly 30 femtoseconds long, that is 30 quadrillionth of a second!). In between, there is us physicists, engineers, other scientists and technicians trying to make it all happen. The key element to our field of research is world-wide collaboration. This is what I like it best about my work, because it gives me many opportunities to go abroad, learn from other projects and meet people from all over the world.
As for my bio, I actually have a degree in electrical engineering and then switched to physics during my diploma thesis. Now I am about to turn in my PhD-thesis and it is a pretty hectic time, but I try to keep my "normal" life. For me this means that I meet with my friends after work or go throwing frisbees in the park. I am a big fan of music so I can usually be found at the local indie, ska or electro gigs and at the clubs in my neighborhood. I have also started a band recently, so I spend my nights on a Midi keyboard fiddling with music software now. The songs are pathetically bad, but I think we are up-and-coming!