CURRICULUM VITAE
Name: von der Mey
First Name: Martin
Born: 28 August 1971 in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)
Citizenship: German
Marital status: Single
Professional address: UCLA, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy,
Box 951547, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Knudsen Hall,
Los Angeles, California, 90095-1547, USA
Phone: (Home)+1-310-478-7484
(Work) +1-310-206-5022
Email:
Languages: bilingual German and Spanish, fluent in English and French
Undergraduate Education
28 August 71: Born in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)
1977-1989: Alexander-von-Humboldt High school in Lima, Peru. Bachelor degree in 1989.
1990-1996: Physics and Biomedicine Study at the Institute of Technology RWTH Aachen, Germany, with focus on Particle Physics.
1994: Summer job at BOSCH in Hamburg, Germany.
November 95 -: Diploma thesis in the group of Prof A. Boehm
October 96 on photon signatures inside the L3 Detector at LEP in CERN, Geneva.
From these measurements limits on new physics (SUSY) were set. The L3 detector took data 24 hours a day for 300 days a year from 1989 to 2000.
For the analysis of the data taken, I wrote programs in Fortran and C language. The subject of the thesis in particle physics (HEP) was:
Measurement of e+e- -> gamma gamma (gamma) with the L3 Detector
In biomedicine I studied the different methods available for testing the fast switching in Na+ channels.
I was also in charge of lab experiments that physic students had to perform. I graded them according to their performance.
October 96: Diploma in Physics and Biomedicine in Germany.
Postgraduate
March 97 – PhD thesis at CERN in Geneva in the group of Prof. Albrecht
December 99 Boehm and Prof. Joachim Mnich, working in the L3 collaboration at CERN in Geneva. The subject of the thesis was:
Measurement of e+e- -> qq(gamma) with the L3 Detect
I measured the cross section and event shapes of hadrons taken with the L3 Detector at LEP. At CERN data was taken 24 hours a day for 300 days.
For analyzing the big amount of data taken every day I wrote programs in Fortran and C language. Every two days, I had to present the results in our collaboration meetings (over 30 participants). This assured to good functionality of the detector.
Besides data analysis, I was also in charge of the hardware (electronic) and software of the Scintillator Counter System. The Scintillator Counter System was an important detector and electronic part of the Level 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. The information coming out of the electronic was send to the global trigger system and recorded on disc for further analysis.
For controlling the Scintillator Counter hardware I wrote programs in Fortran and C, this time running on a VAX system.
January 00: PhD in Experimental Particle Physics.
Postdoc
March 00 - Current : Postdoc at UCLA. Working for the CMS collaboration at CERN, Geneva and the CDF collaboration at FERMILAB, Chicago.
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, reading out high voltages and currents and generating test pulses.
For CMS, more than 500 ALCT2001 electronic boards containing these chips are begin produced and tested. While programming the Xilinx FPGAs, I gained expertise in chip programming and hardware debugging. Every few months, I present the newest 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. Therefore I gained experienced in OO programming.
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 UC Davis. This cyclotron generates a beam of 63.3 MeV protons. The idea was to monitor the behavior of our electronics under similar conditions to the ones at CMS.
I was over 1 year also in charge of our ALCT production in the lab. That meant supervising over 10 students every week in the ALCT testing. I also wrote some of the necessary firmware and software for testing these boards. The test firmware was written in Verilog and the test suit used Delphi Borland (Pascal). The tests by the students were performed using Windows computer.
Besides the ALCT2001, UCLA designs with the help of CERN engineers another chip (Comparator chip) for the CLCT2001; an electronic board designed at OSU and produced by OSU. This trigger board similar to the ALCT2001 gets input signals now from the cathodes of our muon chambers and takes decisions in few microseconds about where the muons crossed the chambers. Therefore it samples the analog signals.
The decisions taken by the ALCT2001 and the CLCT2001 are send to further electronics to get further analyzed and combined.
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 also 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 the DAQ system. It gets all the signals of the ALCTs and CLCTs and takes decisions about the matching between the muons found by each of them.
I wrote the software (C++) necessary to control the functionalities of this board. This software is implemented in the whole DAQ software that will be used to test the electronics and chamber first at the Fastsites (UCLA, UFL, Fermilab, PNPI, Beijing) and later at CERN.
I am also familiar with other programming languages like Perl and Python.
I worked on the implementation of our electronics functionalities inside the ORCA simulation at CMS.
Also, I was involved in 3 test beams at CERN, to test our electronics and tune the whole endcap muon system readout.
The department of physics at UCLA is also involved in CDF at Fermilab.
For CDF, I wrote a program to perform the calibration and performed the first 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 at CDF in Fermilab, I had to fly often for several days to Fermilab.
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 general simulation package used is GEANT. But since GEANT is time consuming I implemented a fast simulator for the Shower Max simulation called GFLASH used at H1. Since it is based on saved shower profiles, it had to be tuned to the data at CDF.
Besides these tasks, UCLA is involved in SUSY searches. Based on this theory, I guided the analysis of one of our graduate students now at FNAL.
At UCLA, I administrate a Linux PC cluster. On this cluster, we have the CDF offline reconstruction code installed. The code gets updated every night. Our students use it to perform analysis of the CDF data and to simulate Monte Carlo events.
I also was 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.
In 2001 I had the opportunity to teach, “Physics 1B” at UCLA. It is a lecture in general physics in electrodynamics for engineers. This increased my understanding of how much work teaching involves and how rewarding it can be.
In August of 2003 I was nominated to CDF Offline Production Coordinator. Therefore, I moved beginning of august to Fermilab. The position involves being in charge of software development and management of more than 40 people in the CDF experiment. I have to organize weekly meetings in which the newest tasks have to be discussed and new problems have are resolved. It involves working over 16 hours a day to get the software packages working as expected and to get the data ready for users to analyze.
For analysis, I am involved at CDF in the electroweak group. I am measuring the Pt spectrum of the Z, decaying into electrons. The measurement of the low energy region is very important since it can’t be calculated in perturbation theory and it is universal to all bosons. This distribution is an important input in fitting PDFs. A good measurement of this spectrum would reduce errors on the PDFs.