EEC 037: CERN-How Searching for the Big Bang is Helping Medical Services with Steve Myers

What is CERN’s mission?  How Searching for the Big Bang is Helping Medical Services with Steve Myerst is CERN’s contribution to the medical field? Steve Myers explains the Big Bang and how CERN’s research is helping medical services.

Steve Myers gave a presentation to the American International Club of Geneva on September 25, 2015, at 12h00 at the Intercontinental Hotel.

Professor Steve Myers will talk about our relationship as a civilization with particle accelerators.  Perhaps most often we think of the use of these sophisticated and often enormous machines to provide us with insight as to the dawn of the universe, and indeed this is a very important application for which they are used throughout the world.  However, they are also in widespread use for the treatment of cancer, scientific research into the properties of materials and in security.

Today’s particle accelerators and detectors are among the most complicated and expensive scientific instruments ever built by mankind, and they exploit almost every aspect of today’s cutting-edge engineering technologies. In many cases accelerator needs have been the driving force behind these new technologies; necessity being the mother of invention. The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most recent and most powerful of these devices.

In this lecture, an overview is given of some of the engineering requirements for construction of modern day accelerators with particular reference to the LHC. The initial commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider which was immediately followed by a serious technical accident is described as the steps needed for recovery after the accident. Operation from 2010 until 2012 is briefly documented. This period allowed the increase in performance of the collider to provide sufficient data for the discovery of the Higgs’ boson.

Finally, following a recent initiative, CERN’s technologies, developed for particle physics, are now being applied to medicine. This includes medical imaging and the use of the particle beams for cancer therapy. A description of these technologies and their application to medicine is given.

Who is Steven Myers?

Head of CERN Medical Application, Former Director of Accelerators and Technology

Stephen Myers (born August 3, 1946) is an electronic engineer who works in high-energy physics.

Myers earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering in 1968 from Queen’s University, Belfast, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1972. Thereafter he worked at CERN. In September 2008, he was appointed CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology, and in 2014, he was appointed Head of CERN Medical Applications.

He has been given honorary doctorates by the University of Geneva in 2001 and by Queen’s University, Belfast in 2003. In 2013 Queen’s University, Belfast named him an honorary professor. He was elected as a fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2003, and of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2012. He became an honorary member of the European Physical Society in 2013, and of the Royal Irish Academy in 2015.

He won the Duddell Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 2003. In 2010 he won the International Particle Accelerators Lifetime Achievement Prize “for his numerous outstanding contributions to the design, construction, commissioning, performance optimization, and upgrade of energy-frontier colliders – in particular, ISR, LEP, and LHC – and to the wider development of accelerator science”. With several other CERN directors, he was jointly awarded the EPS Edison Volta Prize in 2012 and the Prince of Asturias Prize of Spain in 2013. He became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2013

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