A rare opportunity to conduct summer research at the birthplace of the Internet brought student Hamad Mohamed (B.S. ’11) to Geneva’s European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) last summer.

“I felt a great responsibility on my shoulders, as such an opportunity doesn’t come along often,” says Mohamed. “Apart from the great responsibility, it simply felt like a dream come true.”

While in Geneva, Mohamed worked to create a system that monitors the performance of approximately 35,000 optical links installed on CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. The CMS is a general-purpose detector used to observe a wide range of particles from high-energy collisions.

Mohamed’s system, which scans billions of entries, then manipulates and graphs them in seconds, will allow researchers to predict the evolution of link performance with increasing radiation. His work can be applied to any monitoring process that contains a significant number of entries that need to be processed in a short period of time.

Now working as a data center engineer for Gulf Air, Mohamed credits the CERN summer program for launching his career. “This experience gave me a clear perspective of my goals and the enthusiasm to chase them,” he says.

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