Unlocking the Secrets of CERN: Insights with Alberto Di Meglio, Digital Strategy Lead

Join us for an inspiring conversation with Alberto Di Meglio, Digital Strategy Lead at CERN’s CIO Office, as he shares his remarkable journey and decades-long experience at the world’s leading particle physics laboratory. Discover CERN’s core mission, behind-the-scenes stories of groundbreaking discoveries such as the Higgs boson, and transformative innovations ranging from the World Wide Web to the origins of cloud computing. Alberto also discusses the importance of multidisciplinary thinking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, while offering valuable advice for future scientists and leaders. If you are passionate about science, technology, and global collaboration, this episode is a must-watch.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Welcome to another episode of The Brand Called You, a podcast and a video show which brings you leadership, knowledge and experience from hundreds of successful individuals from around the world. I'm your host, Fritz Bussumerger, and today I'm pleased to have a conversation with Alberto Di Meglio. Alberto, welcome to the program.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Thank you, Fritz. Very nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Alberto, you have a short but very significant bio. You are currently the Digital Strategy Lead at CERN, and you've been with CERN almost your whole professional life since January 1989, if I believe.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Eighty-eight.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, eighty-eight. And you educated both in Italy and in England. In Italy, you have a cum laude 100 out of 100. Congratulations. Well done. So I'm curious. We've heard about CERN a lot, and we're going to talk about CERN. The first question I had, I just had to ask that because when I looked at your background, you mentioned a perfect score in Italy. I'm just wondering, is that score needed to get into CERN?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  So, yes, in a way it is. I mean, CERN is a very competitive environment. Some people might call it a bit, you know, elite from a scientific knowledge and scientific generation point of view. So academic qualifications are certainly one of the criteria used to recruit people. So, you know, having a perfect score, maybe, you know, even a PhD on top of a degree or a master, yeah, it's quite quite useful, yes.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  So, CERN, for those people who don't know, you're going to tell us hopefully a lot about CERN, but it's based in Geneva, Switzerland. How did you get into CERN?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  So it's an interesting story, because I mean, you mentioned, yeah, I mean, I have a master's degree in Italy,

• 2:14Speaker 01

  in aerospace engineering. So my initial, you know, professional direction was actually not relevant for CERN at all. So the how I got to CERN is an interesting story. So I got my master's degree in Italy first, and then in Italy at the time, it was still, it was a mandatory military service period of time. So after my degree, I spent a bit more of a one year in the Italian Navy, working with some, you know, activities related to maritime activities,

• 2:54Speaker 01

  which is not space, like in my original, but there are some similarities of how things happen in atmospheric conditions, or upper atmospheric condition, or just beyond the atmosphere, and what happens underwater, completely different environment in terms of viscosity and materials, but techniques are the same. So I spent some time in there, and then, because of my experience in the Navy, I was contacted to be part of a European Commission-funded project in the UK, Birmingham University,

• 3:36Speaker 01

  to work on simulation of underwater acoustics telecommunications systems. So that was the purpose. Now, I spent four years in the UK working on this after the military service, and then after that, I was looking for something interesting to do, and one of my colleagues at Birmingham had just applied to CERN.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  So I said, I mean, why not? Let's do, let's try the same. So I, I applied. And actually, a lot of the techniques I, I was researching on for, for simulation, acoustic fields, et cetera, were relevant for some aspects of simulation of, of particle physics activities. So I applied, especially for computing, and I, I got a position. So it's a, it's a voyage across three or four different disciplines that, starting from space, led me to the subatomic level of, of research.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got that. Now, um, you're currently the digital strategy lead at CERN. Does that involve direct work on the core business of CERN? Or more supporting the infrastructure to allow research to do their research?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a bit of both. So this is a, the CERN has, for the first time in, in its more than 70 years history, a chief information officer and a CIO office. So this is not typical. So it's typical outside many organizations, but CERN never had that. And computing, it is considered one of the main pillars of CERN with research and education. But usually, there was never a specific focus on computing research. This is not in the CERN mission. Now, today, with everything that is happening in the digital technology space and ecosystem,

• 5:39Speaker 01

  artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, quantum computing, a bit more attention on, on, on, on digital activities and, and, and development is, is more and more important. So an office was created and I have been appointed as a digital strategy lead within the CIA office. The CIA office also has activities of data governance, data privacy, cybersecurity, vendor management in terms of technology, et cetera. But I'm responsible for the digital activities. So it is certainly. A core pillar is not physics fundamental research, but the boundaries between what is computing and what is physics is blurring.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  And there are more and more discussions about computing for physics, but also physics for computing. So for example, AI, physics-driven AI modeling, this is today is becoming very, very important. So, you know, it's, it's an interesting multidisciplinary conversation between physics, computing and other types of research.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Uh, okay. So that bears me to question, um, now focusing on CERN. What is the core objective of CERN? What do you try to achieve?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so CERN, first of all, CERN is an international laboratory. So the, the, the core mission of CERN since the beginning is to provide, um, the instruments, so the, the older, the device and technologies and infrastructure that an international community of physicists, of researchers can use to do their research around nuclear physics and particle physics and the, you know, understanding how the universe essentially was, was generated in the, in the first place. So CERN today designs and operates the, the Large Hadron Collider. It's the largest particle collider in the world.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, could you maybe, um, give a little bit more explanation of its dimensions? What, so people who don't, are not familiar with that, what that is?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Sure. So today, so as I mentioned, the Large Hadron Collider is the largest in the world. Large for the LHC, the acronym stands for Large Hadron Collider. So large is because it's very large. It's 27 kilometers circumference, is 100, an average of 100 meters underground um, in, across the border between France and, and Switzerland.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  And hadron collider, it is because of course collider, because you know, particles collide in hadron, because it is designed for heavy particles, so protons and ions. And the goal is really is to is to take these particles Yeah. and accelerate them to a speed which is very close to the speed of light inside the the the ring of the collider and then make them collide. And once the particles collide, they produce other particles, they produce a lot of effects. And researchers look at these effects and these other particles and based on the on the current knowledge of physics,

• 8:57Speaker 01

  they try to understand what happened in the first place in the collision, trying to recreate the conditions at the very beginning of the origin of the universe, so the just fractions, tiny fraction of seconds after the big bang, to understand why the universe came into place. There are today, there is something called the standard model of physics that describe, you know, sort of taxonomy of different types of particles and forces and interactions, which is very well understood, but still it explains about five percent of what the universe is made of, five percent. But there is a ninety-five percent of something else that we today, humanity, doesn't really know very well.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  And this is partly what is called dark matter, partly what is called dark energy. There are many open questions about matter and antimatter, for example. Why, you know, we see matter in the universe, we don't see naturally antimatter. We can create antimatter in laboratory, but we don't see it. Now, the the laws of physics are for the vast majority, in most cases, are symmetric. So, why, you know, if the same amount of matter and same amount of antimatter had been created at the origin of the universe, they would have immediately annihilated back together.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And there would be no universe today. So there has been some kind of unbalance, some, some, some, you know, lack of symmetry in the origin that gave rise to the universe as we know it today. All these mechanisms are not very well understood today. And, you know, what is dark matter? We know there is, there is an amount of mass in the, in the universe that is enough to keep the galaxies together, et cetera. But the standard model doesn't justify all the mass that we see. So there are many more things that we need to, to, to investigate, to discover. We have, there are so many open questions. And these accelerators, these devices, provide the tools, the instruments for the community to try and give an answer to those questions. This is the core mission.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Okay. Basically, also what I'm hearing you say, if I understand correctly, is the universe, the world we live in only exists because it's not perfect.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yes. Perfection, I mean, we are lucky that perfection doesn't exist. It would be very, very boring. So there are so many, so many strange things, so many strange effects, you know, ruptures of symmetry that, yeah, that create the nature and the universe as we know it today. So.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  A couple of questions related to that. First of all, maybe a very pragmatic business question, but what justifies the large investment both in energy, time and funding in the CERN?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so this is a question that, as you can imagine, this is not the first time we get that question. So, of course, you know, there is a, a value in scientific knowledge per se. So trying to understand why things exist the way they exist, or where we come from, where we are going. Those questions have a value per se. Now, trying, in the process of answering those questions, provides opportunities for creation of many different types of value, business value, economic values, technical values, societal value.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Sometimes I, I made the comparison between what we do today with the, the race to the moon.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  In the, in, in, in the last century now, in, in the, in the sixties. Of course, going to the moon was important just per se. But there are, there were motivations behind that were, you know, of many different type. And doing that generated a lot of technology that we use today. So CERN is exactly the same. We, we try to understand that the universe was, was, you know, came into place. But by doing that, we develop medical accelerators. We develop a new type of materials. We develop the digital, digital touchscreens that, that you use today on, on, on your mobile phone. Come from original technologies, certain technologies. So there are so many things that happen that produce return on investment for the member states

• 13:16Speaker 01

  and for all the contributors to the experiment to, you know, why we do fundamental research.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Okay. Um, thank you for that. Now, what would you consider to be, let's say, the milestones, uh, first of all, in your career? And to what extent are those milestones, uh, aligned with, uh, CERN?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So for, for me, my, so I, I've been very lucky. I've, I've done, uh, really many different things. And CERN is a place where even if you stay for thirty years, so you, you don't do the same things for, for too long. So I mentioned, I, I started as an aerospace engineer. And I, I, at the beginning, I was working a bit on, um, my original interest was a simulation of spaceborne infrastructures. And then I moved to simulation of underwater infrastructures, uh, devices. Then at CERN, initially at CERN, I, I started as a, as a system engineer. This was purely computing infrastructure. So it was, was a time of transition between the different, you know, mainframe systems to more commodity computing.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And my original role was to take part in the design of this transition. But then that was the time between the end of the previous accelerator, the LAMP, and the start of the new accelerator, the Large Ion Collider. So, there is a big difference, there was a big difference between the LEP and the LHC in terms of the amount of data that the community was expecting to be generated from the experiments we use in the accelerator. And it was clear since the beginning that it was not going to be possible anymore to simply have a computer next door or under your desk to analyze this data.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  So the community started looking at how to design an international, heavily distributed infrastructure. And this was what SIRMA with the community started doing at the beginning of the, you know, between the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, between 2002, 2003 up to 2010, to design the international distributed computing infrastructure that we called the grid. Yeah. And the grid, as from a technology point of view, is a precursor of the cloud. And so what is called cloud computing today, which we are all familiar with, actually

• 15:45Speaker 01

  started with these discussions of how to massively distribute and analyze the scientific data. The business model was different, but technology, the community designed the very first massive internationally distributed computing infrastructure. So that was one of the initial milestones. And my experience with distributed computing systems for underwater applications, but you know, the same kind of techniques were very important, were very instrumental for me to take part in that endeavor. And I was particularly responsible for designing, for coordinating the project that designed

• 16:29Speaker 01

  most of the software that was used across infrastructure. So the term is not used today very much, but at the time you had the hardware infrastructure, you had the applications, and in between you had something called the middleware. Yeah. All the service, the tools and services that in a bridge hardware infrastructure with the application and data management, computing management, etc. So that was a very intense time, was a project funded by, by the member state of CERN, by the community, by the European Commission, to design this infrastructure. And that changed the world, changed the world scientifically speaking. But the, the, the, the societal impact, the economic impact that came out of the work

• 17:13Speaker 01

  done thirty years ago has changed the world.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it almost makes me think that I'm now, so my, my thought is, hey, I'm talking to one of the fathers of cloud technology.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, I'm one of the brothers of all the people that, that did that. You know, I, I gave my, my contribution certainly, especially in the European ecosystem to, to structure that.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Okay, no, accept that. But what I'm also hearing is, because when I look at the internet and the browser, tell me a little bit about CERN and CERN milestones. I come across two, notably the Higgs boson discovery and the invention of the World Wide Web, which, I mean, those are, I'd say, worldwide phenomenon, especially the World Wide Web, and we'll talk about Higgs boson a little bit later. But you just mentioned also two other very significant contributions, which I could not find in my preparation, where the whole cloud concept and the touchscreen.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Almost seems like CERN is, has the same, I'd say, issues with marketing itself as a lot of other, I would say, scientists, IT people around the world.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  That, that, that is certain. That is, yeah, I mean, of course, so, yeah, the, the World Wide Web, you know, was invented at CERN, again, for a very practical reason. All the inventions coming from CERN are, are done for practical reasons. We have a problem to solve and we, we solve it. So the World Wide Web was done in this way to share information across the, the community in the late eighties. Then the grid came along ten years later to solve again the problem of massively distributed data. You know, the different dimension. There is this technology process of inventions that happen continuously. The touchscreen were invented to ease maintenance of underground or, you know,

• 19:27Speaker 01

  technical installations. So if you have gloves or other constraints, that is more practical. But there is indeed a lot more. We are a bit, we were at least a bit shy in promoting this. Okay, the focus is on science. If something happens as a side effect, then we give it back to the world. But we use not to follow it very much. Today, this is not the case for many reasons. We are, we are much more mature and careful in managing in the innovation process and the return on investment and the collaboration. We talk, we tend to talk about knowledge transfer, for example, rather than technology transfer.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Because of course, there is technology, but we, we want to transfer and not even transfer. We talk about knowledge sharing, because this is a, is a, is a bidirectional process of interacting with with other scientific communities, etc. But yeah, I mean, today, also with the, with the new CIA office, we have a much more careful approach to, to managing this, this technology, return on investment, for sure.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now, I think everybody around the world can assess how significant the World Wide Web is. How significant was Higgs boson?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  For, for the community, of course, it was, was a major milestone. It was, it was the last missing piece within this.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  This model, this standard model of physics that I mentioned. So the X boson was the missing piece, was found. So the model is complete. There are a number of things, smaller parts to be clarified, but the model is complete. But the main, the true importance behind the X boson is that it's a particular type of particle. You know, it's a boson. And is that is actually the element, the component that gives mass to every other particle. So without the X boson, all the other particles in the model could not have mass. So the universe would not exist.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Okay. Now, you were at CERN in 2012, and it was discovered. Can you take us back? How does that look like? I mean, on one hand, I'm comparing this to, you could say, you mentioned, compared it to landing on the moon. So is everybody coming together in a hall and said, hey, look, we're seeing the discovery in real time? Is the, I cannot mention the meaning that dramatic. But how does one know, okay, it's been discovered?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  How did that look like?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  It's not real time. So this is, you know, so you consider the experiments that use the Large Hadron Collider. Imagine them as a sort of gigantic microscopes.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Looking down at the subatomic ground. So it is not possible to see exactly what happens at the moment of collision. That's why we have this immense data processing system to understand what happened. And what you do is not just one observation. You need to build a probability distribution of what happens. And this takes millions and millions and millions of repetitions of collisions. But over time, you build this probability distribution and you can say, yeah, that looks like what.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  The theory says the exposure exposure should look like. And when you get to a certain level of precision, I can say, yeah, I mean, we have found it. And actually, this is what happens in the the the announcement was done in this way. So the two main experiment, ATLAS and CMS, had independently discovered, you know, the different, you know, the the the

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  The boson.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  But but I'm uh uh am I correct in that you're saying, look, this is the second statistically, the most, uh, you could say, uh, the best answer. Uh, so statistically, it still could be that you've, uh, the experiment shows something else.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Uh, so, yes, that's why it's not it's not sufficient to see it a few times. You know, you need to build something, you know, the in the in the probability distribution. You know, you have the the

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I I understand that. So, uh, uh, at a certain point, okay, I've done it so many times, it comes back to the same answer. So it has to be that.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you

• 24:09Speaker 00

  You're based on statistics and not an absolute.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, because this, I mean, when you when you get beyond a certain level of precision, this is called is five, five sigma precision, then it is statistically, I mean, it's it's a bit contradictory, but it's statistically a certainty.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Of course, but because that that doesn't mean that it is not, that there is a probability that it's not that. It is a that sometimes something else can happen. But if you build this distribution, you this matches exactly what the exposure in this case looks like. When when you

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Okay, so that matches perfectly. It's not, there is no doubt that it is like that. But it means that sometimes the same process might produce something different in a very, very, you know, small amount of of times.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Actually, this is what we see if if it actually, you know, I reverse your your comment. If we had found something hundred percent of the times, that would be wrong.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Nature doesn't work like that. So the the the probability distribution we found matches exactly what we were expecting.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  I'll have that I'll let that have to let that think in. Hey, a couple of questions, what? Drives you, what motivates you to spend all those years working for CERN?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  So it is, because as I mentioned a few minutes ago, is is the variety of things. There is never a moment of of, you know, being bored. I don't know what to do. There are so many people to interact with at all levels, researchers from the worldwide community activities. There is physics, there is computing, material science, electronics. And I'm lucky that my career through CERN brought me to touch a bit of everything. I was always in the digital space, but I've interacted with so many activities, so many people. It's fascinating and I like very much this aspect of

• 26:20Speaker 01

  discovering things from a fundamental science point of view, but producing impact on society and people. It's a fantastic combination of activities.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  So then I have to ask you, were you bored all those years ago when you because I saw that you set up your own company, Soft Plumbers for a couple of years. Was that like a mistake you made? Or what was the reason you went? Because you were at CERN, you started a company and you came back?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yes. So, no, no, I, not a mistake, not a mistake. I think it's part of the process. So when, you know, after I I spent four years during research in Birmingham in the UK. Then I came three years for CERN, working as a system architect. And at some point, I I realized something was missing in my general background. Okay, it was very academic, very scientific, very technical. But I didn't have the feeling of how to measure impact on of the business side of things. So I decided there was a combination of two things. I wanted to have that experience.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  And I consider that that was the period of, the golden period of startup, you know, everybody was becoming rich doing startups. So I took the opportunity that where, I know, I had ideas to develop some technology that could be used for monitoring distributed networks.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And I took the opportunity to see whether this could be transformed into, you know, a commercial activity. So I, that lasted three years, so I left CERN, at the time it was quite rare, leaving CERN with an ongoing contract. Today, there are many opportunities and that is not so rare anymore, but at the time it was not.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  Okay, so a- after that period, uh, did you go back? Did they ask you to come back? I mean, have you been in contact all those periods, uh, all that time?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Um, so I, I kept following the activities of CERN, it was at the moment of building, you know, the initial design of, of the grid. Um, so i- i- it's again, it's a progression because the three years that I spent, uh, creating and managing my, my startup gave me this, uh, you know, business, uh, and more industrial knowledge that I was, was missing. Was, uh.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Uh, so now go, go ahead.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  No, it was a very interesting, very interesting experience, it was very, but was also very stressful.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  It was incredibly.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  So. So i- if, if you look back, um. Wh- um, it, it'll, um, on one hand, okay, you've gained that experience you were lacking in your, uh, you say, I don't have that. Uh, but to what extent have you also then realized that, okay, I know what I left behind, I went back to that?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  E- exactly, exactly. So that, that, that is the fundamental question. So after three years, I, I could say now I have the experience, but I was really missing the way CERN works, the international dimension, the scientific aspects. So I, I found an opportunity to, to go back and I can say, again, as I mentioned, was, uh, managing a startup was very stressful, but coming, I, I came back to CERN with, I was a different person. And that's why, you know, the, my, my activities after coming back were not the same as the, the, the original ones. I started doing project management and coordination, which I could not do three years earlier.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  So again, as part of a process, I, I, I don't think it was a mistake, but I was missing the, the international scientific aspects of CERN, for sure.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Okay, got that. Um, so after all those years for CERN, um, is this also where you're going to end your career?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I never, I never, you know, someone said that it's very, it is easy to predict, or is easy to predict the future if it has already happened. Something like this, so I cannot say what is going to happen in the next five to six years. But at the moment, what I'm doing is so exciting, so interesting that I certainly don't see the need to.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  I would have expected the media, yes, of course, because even after all those years, you talk so passionately about what an organization like CERN are. And I can fully understand that if you work in an environment with so many high-level, uh, smart people, it has to be inspiring. I cannot imagine otherwise.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So that's why, so, I mean, what I'm doing at the moment is extremely exciting, not only from a technology point of view, but also, as I said, that this is the first time CERN has a CIO office, as a digital technology, a digital strategy lead. So we are building something new, which is extremely interesting, extremely exciting. But, you know, there are so many opportunities, you know, in three or four years, uh, let's say, you know, this becomes a bit the norm again, we have a running office, etc. I can do something else within CERN and I can train, I mean, I'm getting closer to my retirement, which means I will do something else, but, you know, my, part of my duties is also to train the next generation.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  So I will start thinking about my succession plan and who comes after me.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Okay, two final questions then, Alberto. First of all,

• 32:14Speaker 00

  what do you see as your own legacy? What are you leaving behind at CERN?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  So I I hope I I live this multidisciplinary perspective on science, okay. I I've been a scientist for some time. I'm I'm not a scientist today, I'm more a manager of of science. And I I think it is a it is necessary in the in the in in this type of endeavors that span many decades of of work, many different types of people, many cultures, many activities, to have this multidisciplinary view on on on science and technology, on on the business aspects, on interaction, etc. So I think I I I've built this

• 33:08Speaker 01

  figure for for, you know, within CERN, be it exists elsewhere, but I I built this type of of multidisciplinary profile that is not so common. And I I would like this to become more common in the in the management of

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  of of this type of scientific activity. So this is, I hope, the legacy I can leave.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Okay, and then finally, thank you for that answer, by the way. Uh, you said, okay, you're looking for the next generation. What's the, in your view, the single most valuable advice or lesson you want to pass on to the next generation?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  So it it is a it it is a, if you want to relate it to to this. So the it is always necessary to keep an open mind. Uh, things in science, in technology, in in society change so rapidly, so dramatically sometimes, that if if we think we know everything, that the way we work is the way everybody should work, we're lost. Okay, so always, you know, you you need the, you can become specialized in something, but you need to to know a bit of everything else. And you need to be ready to challenge your own assumptions, to put yourself in in question. Am I taking the right decision? Is this the right direction?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Can we try something else? And listen to to people that are, you know, there are there are. I've run in, you know, in through situations where there was a difficulty. So people don't listen to each other. Okay. So listening to each other, it's always necessary. Maybe you don't agree. That's fine. But listening, trying to understand, and then you take your own, your own decisions. But if you don't listen, the decision you take will always be wrong.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  There is always something missing.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Over that's such a, that's such a great way to end this conversation because it's been a pleasure to listen to you talk about your career at CERN. And I really want to thank you for sharing that with the brand called you. Thanks so much.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you for this.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Thank you for listening to the brand called you, videocast and podcast, a platform that brings you knowledge, experience and wisdom of hundreds of successful individuals from around the world. Do visit our website, www.tbcy.in to watch and listen to the stories of many more individuals. You can also follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Just search for the brand called you.