Monica Pepe Altarelli arrived at CERN in 1983, after her Ph.D. Today she's the team leader of a group of 60 physicists in the LHCb collaboration, which includes in total 700 researchers from 48 universities belonging to 14 countries. She's also involved in the management of a quality control system for online data, crucial to the LHCb experiment.

"I must confess that I got involved with physics by chance, after I risked becoming something completely different, a theatre actor, or maybe an architect. Now it's up to my daughter Giulia to pursue one of my former passions: she has just enrolled in the Architecture at the EPFL of Losanna, half an hour away from CERN. Although I'm completely committed to LHC's physics, I hope to slip back into that environment by going to listen to some of her classes."