ACADEMIA

GridPP have announced that Dave Britton will be the Project Leader for GridPP3. Dave will take over in April 2008, when GridPP3 is scheduled to start. Below, Dave tells us why he agreed to take the job, that he doesn't like quarterly reports and why one of his favorite songs is for toddlers. So, you're going to be project leader in GridPP3. What have you been doing in GridPP1 and 2? At the start of GridPP I was "Resource Manager" but our Oversight Committee insisted that we appoint a Project Manager. Since I was effectively doing this already, I officially become Project Manager after the first year. One side of my job involves a lot of drudgery trying to quantify the progress and success of our project but the other side, being closely involved in making the strategic and tactical decisions which ultimately determines the success of the project, is very rewarding. Why did you want to be project leader? How did you get chosen? Well, I only "want" to be Project Leader in the same sense that I might say I "want" to go to the dentist: in advance it seems a rational sort of decision but once you are sitting in the chair that all changes! Tony has done such a good job that nobody in their right mind would want to succeed him, particularly as we get into the really difficult part of the project. However, I don't think I could be Project Manager any longer than 5 years and yet I really didn't want to leave GridPP completely. The CB set up a search committee to identify a new leader and I was approached and, eventually, agreed. What do you think will be the main challenges for GridPP3? Particle Physics works really well in the UK as a collaborative venture even though people are involved in different experiments which are competing for the same resources. Nevertheless, things will probably get tough once the LHC turns on and I think that one challenge will be to continue to operate with mutual respect and good humour in an environment with insufficient resources. On the technical side, I fear that security is a snake in the grass waiting to bite us - we may be lucky or we may be unlucky - and that the primitive state of the "upper middleware" will be a disappointment and a frustration to many people who are waiting on the sidelines for the LHC data. Don't you live in Canada? Will you be project leader from there? Yes I live in Montreal and, whilst Project Manager, this is not too difficult. I travel to the UK about 10 times a year but certainly spend less time (and probably money) commuting into work than most of my colleagues at Imperial. But as Project Leader I think that I will need to be in the UK much more frequently and I plan to move back, though not necessarily to live close to London. There are small matters such as a house and schools to sort out. What did you do before GridPP - are you a physicist, a computer scientist, or something else? How did you get involved in GridPP? I am a physicist. I've worked on rare pion decay at TRIUMF, the ARGUS experiment at DESY, CLEO, BaBar, and most recently CMS. Historically I have been more involved in the detector physics side, working on the ARGUS micro-vertex chamber, the BaBar drift-chamber, and CMS end-cap crystals in particular. However, I've always been active on the software and computing side. In the early 90's I worked at SLAC with Paul Kunz on a project called Gismo (it was to be a replacement for Geant-3) which was originally based on the NeXT computer platform and was first written in Objective-C before moving to C++. It's ironic that this was the period when Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN on a NeXT computer and came up with World Wide Web (Gismo was ultimately replaced by Geant-4) - so I wasn't quite in the right place at the right time! What else do you do now, apart from GridPP? Do you work for any experiment? As GridPP has consumed more and more of my time I have contributed less and less to CMS. The lab that I set up at Imperial (with the help of various RA's, most crucially Gavin Davies) to measure the longitudinal uniformity of CMS lead tungstate end-cap crystals produced excellent data for many years. This has just now been dismantled and shipped to Italy where it is being recommissioned by Matt Ryan who ran the lab at IC and really deserves a lot of the credit for it's longevity. What do you enjoy most about working for GridPP? The people I work with make it all worthwhile. It's fairly rare, at least in my experience, to be able to work in a project where, without exception, all the crucial people are a pleasure to work with. What's the hardest part of being project manager? Getting Quarterly Reports and then actually processing them. What do you do in your spare time? I've never understood the concept of spare time (nor the concept of spare change, actually). I regard time as the most valuable asset I possess but I do spend a lot of it running. Before GridPP I managed to do some serious Marathon running, ultimately qualifying, a couple of years, for London and starting at the front with the Olympic and World Champions (only to lose sight of them some 30 pico-seconds after the gun went off!). However, now I find it hard to maintain the type of rigorous running schedule that is needed and just "fit in a run" whenever I can (mostly by telling Tony some white-lie to get off the phone!) What's your favorite film, song and book? Working from home I spend about 5 hours a day with my children and I almost start to lose my own identity sometimes! Thus, my three-year-old daughter's favourite song is currently "The Recycling Song" (Curious George) and my seven-year-old son's favourite movie is Les Triplettes de Belleville (definitely worth watching!). Books are a bit like wine in that the experience depends somewhat on the environment at the time. One of the best experiences I had was reading Steinbeck's East of Eden in the Salinas Valley in California (where the story is set) but as an all time favourite I would go for something by Ian McEwan who's use of the English language is simple and stunning. I'd have a hard time choosing between Black Dogs and it's chill of horror in the hot afternoon; the tension in Enduring Love as the boundaries of sanity are reached; and Atonement which, when you finish it, makes you realise that you've been completely had.