Marina Girone

Maria is the Head of CERN openlab. Maria has a PhD in particle physics. She also has extensive knowledge in computing for high-energy physics experiments, having worked in scientific computing since 2002.

Maria has worked for many years on the development and deployment of services and tools for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), the global grid computing system used to store, distribute, and analyse the data produced by the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Maria was the founder of the WLCG operations coordination team, which she also previously led. This team is responsible for overseeing core operations and commissioning new services. 

Throughout 2014 and 2015, Maria was the software and computing coordinator for one of the four main LHC experiments, called CMS. She was responsible for about seventy computing centres on five continents, and managed a distributed team of several hundred people. From 2016 to early 2023, Maria was CERN openlab CTO.

Prior to joining CERN, Maria was a Marie Curie fellow and research associate at Imperial College London. She worked on hardware development and data analysis for another of the LHC experiments, called LHCb — as well as for an experiment called ALEPH, built on the accelerator that preceded the LHC

Alberto Di Meglio

Alberto is the head of IT Innovation. He is an aerospace engineer (MEng) and electronic engineer (PhD) by education. Alberto also has extensive experience in the design, development, and deployment — for both commercial and research applications — of distributed computing infrastructures and software services.

Alberto joined CERN for the first time in 1998 as systems engineer and then co-founded a start-up company developing monitoring systems for distributed computing networks. He joined CERN again in 2004 to take part in the early stages of development of grid computing for research. From 2010 to 2013, Alberto was director of the European Middleware Initiative (EMI), a project responsible for developing and maintaining most of the software services powering the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG).

Alberto served as the Head of CERN openlab from 2016 to early 2023.

François Grey

François is a physicist with a background in nanotechnology, and a passion for citizen science. During the past decade, he has managed the development of a series of online citizen science projects in a wide range of research fields, starting with the launch of LHC@home in 2004 while he was a manager at CERN. In 2009, he established a partnership for citizen science between CERN, the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and the University of Geneva, now called Citizen Cyberlab.

As a professor at the Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI) of the University of Geneva since 2014, he coordinates Citizen Cyberlab, managing the development of technologies for crowdsourced research, exploring the broader impact of citizen science for society, and promoting public participation in science through hands-on events. He also teaches courses on Open Science and Citizen Science at the bachelor and master level. Since 2016 he is Director of the Geneva Tsinghua Initiative, a comprehensive education programme for the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Elizaveta Ragozina

Elizaveta is a Web Applications Engineer with a passion for User Experience and Usability design.

For more than two years, she has been working on CERNBox, CERN’s platform for storing, sharing, and collaborating on data. She is responsible for the new web application. Through CERNBox, Elizaveta's work reaches the whole CERN community and plays a central role in the organization's daily operations.

In her role as a Frontend Engineer and UX designer, Elizaveta is part of the EU-funded CS3MESH4EOSC project that addresses the challenges of file and application service fragmentation, digital sovereignty, and the application of FAIR principles in the everyday practice of researchers.