Curriculum Vitae s273

Curriculum Vitae

I, Martin Norbert von der Mey (German native), was born on August 28, 1971 in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, Africa as the son of Dieter von der Mey (German native), who was a diplomat there representing the German government, and Blanca von der Mey (Peruvian native). My mother’s and father’s cultural and linguistic background enabled me to grow up bilingual in Spanish and German. Since my father was holding a diplomatic position in Ethiopia at the time, I spent the first three years of my life in Africa, before my family moved back to Koblenz, Germany, where I first attended kindergarden. After two years in Koblenz, my father was re-located to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where I started German elementary school. It was also in Bolivia, where my younger brother Frank Juergen von der Mey was born six years my junior. In 1977 we moved to Peru, my mother’s home country, where my father continued his diplomatic service, and I attended the German Alexander-von-Humboldt (Abitur) School in Lima, Peru, where I received my Baccalaureate degree with honors in science in 1989 at the age of 18. Since my interest in Physics and Medicine, and particularly in Particle Physics and Biophysics, had increased throughout high school, I decided to start my undergraduate studies at the Institute of Technology RWTH Aachen, Germany, with a focus on Elementary Particle Physics. I studied Particle Physics in Aachen from 1990 to 1996, when I finished my diploma with best grades and honors. From November 1995 to October 1996, I wrote my diploma thesis in Physics in the group of Prof. A. Boehm and in Biophysics with Prof. Rau. My diploma thesis converts data analysis of data taken with the L3 detector at LEP, located at the “Centre European de Recherche Nuclaire” (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is an international organization founded by 50 countries with more than 5000 employees, and its main purpose is to get a deeper understanding in Physics. The L3 detector took data originating from electron positron collisions 24 hours a day for 300 days a year from 1989 to 2000. For the data taking, a sophisticated trigger and acquisition system was developed. For the analysis of the data taken at LEP, programs written in Fortran and C/C++ languages were developed. The subject of my diploma thesis was about: The Measurement of e+e- ->  with the L3 Detector. Additionally to being in charge of the data analysis, I was also in charge of lab experiments as part of an internship that physics students had to perform while finishing their physics studies. I had to grade them according to their performance. Then in October 1996, I received my diploma in Physics and Biomedicine from Aachen University, Germany.

After receiving my diploma, I decided in March 1997 to continue in Particle Physics and start my PhD thesis at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland in the group of Prof. Joachim Mnich, working with the L3 collaboration at CERN. The subject of my PhD thesis was: The Measurement of e+e- -> qq( with the L3 Detector. During this time I lived in Geneva and had an active role in the experiment. In addition, my knowledge of the French language was increased tremendously, and I am now fluent in French as well as German, Spanish and English. I had to perform data analysis of data taken with the L3 Detector at LEP. At CERN data was taken 24 hours a day for 300 days. For analyzing this big amount of data, I again wrote programs in Fortran, C/C++, Java, and VAX languages. Every two days, I had to present the results in our collaboration meetings (over 300 participants). I was in charge of the hardware (electronic) and software of the Scintillator Counter System. This meant to be responsible and on-call for this system 24 hours a day for 6 months. The Scintillator Counter System was an important detector and electronic part of the Level 1 Trigger System. The detector measured the time of flight of muons passing through the L3 Detector with a resolution of 800 ps. The electronic used consisted of amplifiers, discriminators, TDCs and ADCs. All the necessary electronic had first to be developed and the necessary programs written. Data and data decisions had to be taken very fast and had to send further electronic paths where further decision where taken. We used Oracle as our database to keep track about all happening while taking data. The digested information coming out of the electronic was recorded on disc for further analysis. For controlling the Scintillator Counter hardware I had to write programs in Fortran and C/C++, this time running on a VAX system. Then in January of 2000, after 3 ½ years of postgraduate study, I finally received my PhD in Experimental Particle Physics.

In March of 2000, I re-located to Los Angeles, CA, USA to take a Postdoc position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), working for the CMS collaboration at CERN, Geneva and the CDF collaboration at FERMILAB, Chicago, Illinois, USA. For CMS, UCLA designs the ALCT2001 trigger board. This electronic board takes the Anode signals from our endcap muon strip chamber and decides in a very short time (25 ns) if a real muon has crossed the chamber. I am working on the design and programming of the FPGA logic of the two chips on this board. One of them analyzes the input signals for the patterns it can find and takes decisions based on programmed values. The other one controls the slow control functions of the board, like setting thresholds and reading out high voltages and currents. For CMS, more than 500 ALCT2001 electronic boards containing these chips will be produced, involving a budget larger than 2 million US dollars. While programming the Xilinx FPGAs, I gained expertise in chip programming and hardware debugging. At the moment, we are using Xilinx ISE 4.2 for developing the necessary firmware. Every 2 to 3 months, I present the latest results to the CMS collaboration. In order to control the functionalities of this board, a large amount of software in C++ for the DAQ system had to be written. Besides programming the FPGA chips of the ALCT2001, I performed the radiation tests and analysis of the data taken by our trigger electronics, using the cyclotron at the University of California, Davis (UCD). This cyclotron generates a beam of 63.3 MeV protons. In addition to the ALCT2001, UCLA designs another chip (Comparator chip) for the CLCT2001; an electronic board designed at Ohio State University (OSU). This trigger board similar to the ALCT2001 gets input signals from the muon chambers and takes decisions in a few microseconds about where the muons crossed the chambers. The decisions taken are send to further electronics to get further analyzed. UCLA developed, in close collaboration with people at CERN, the comparator chip, which is an ASIC and used in the CLCT2001 to compare signals in adjacent chambers. I performed the testing of the comparator chips at CERN. UCLA also performs the design and production of the Trigger Mother Board (TMB). This board is the heart of our DAQ system. It gets all the signals of the ALCTs and CLCTs and takes decisions about the matching between the muons found by each one of them. Currently, I am writing the software (C++) necessary to control the functionalities of this board. For CDF, I am performing the calibration of the Shower Max Detector for the Plug. This is a new detector constructed by UCLA and implemented during the upgrade of CDF in FERMILAB. It is a strip chamber and its main purpose is to improve the energy resolution of the electromagnetic calorimeter. For calibrating the detector a software package in C++, using different tools, was developed. To participate in FERMILAB, I have to fly every two weeks for several days to Chicago. In CDF, I implemented the simulation of the Shower Max Detector in the CDF offline simulation and reconstruction package. For this again, some expertise in C++ was necessary. The simulation package used is GEANT. Besides these tasks, UCLA is involved in SUSY searches. Based on this theory, I am guiding the analysis of one of our graduate students now at FERMILAB (FNAL). At UCLA, I administrate a Linux PC cluster made out of 17 1.2 GHz CPUs. On this cluster, we have the CDF offline reconstruction code installed. The code gets updated every night. It is used by our students to perform analysis of the CDF data and to simulate Monte Carlo events. I am currently in charge of building up a computer cluster at FERMILAB. To start with, we have 8 1GHz CPUs connected via Ethernet to a gateway computer. The 9 machines are running LINUX. We use MOSIX to balance the CPU loads between the different machines. We are planning to increase it to 20 CPUs in the future. Over the past 2 ½ years, I repeatedly went to conferences in Geneva, Chicago, Corsica (France), and Maria Laach (Koblenz, Germany), as well as in Kosovo, where I represented the whole L3 collaboration presenting the latest results of the data taken. Besides my research and experimental work, I was also teaching “Physics 1B” at UCLA in the summer of 2001. This is a lecture in general physics and electrodynamics for engineers, which proved to be highly interesting to me, because it increased my understanding of how much work teaching involves and how rewarding it can be.

As a result of my many years of research both in Europe as well as in the US, you can find my extensive list of publications at the following URL: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=find+author+von+der+mey

I will finish my time as postdoc by the end of 2002, when I would like to change my course slightly and move toward experimental research and development in the industry rather than in an educational setting. Since my family is fairly diverse culturally and linguistically speaking, and I have always worked together with different cultures and people of different languages throughout my PhD time in Geneva and my postdoc time at UCLA, I am very open to keep working in such a diverse setting, because I feel that today’s world is highly inter-connected. I would also like to work in an environment where I am faced with new problems and issues on a daily basis, and where I am also challenged to tackle each of these issues and resolve them. I have always supported teamwork and collaborations, but can also work very well individually. I am a very open and social person, who is very much committed to any job I hold and who can easily withstand the daily pressures. I love sports, especially swimming, kick-boxing and surfing. I am looking forward to putting my acquired knowledge in physics and medicine as well as my multi-cultural background to use in the industry, and I feel that your company can give me the opportunity to use my skills in a valuable way to improve today’s society.