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Council week, accelerator restart and COVID-19 measures: your questions answered

The video and presentations from the 8 October information meeting are available online

On Thursday, 8 October, the Director-General Fabiola Gianotti addressed the CERN community alongside members of the directorate. They presented the conclusions of the September Council session and outlined the current situation of the Organization and its expected evolution, in light of the Update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The meeting was broadcast via Webcast and consisted of presentations by Fabiola Gianotti, Frédérick Bordry, Director for Accelerators and Technology, Eckhard Elsen, Director for Research and Computing and James Purvis, Human Resources Department Head. The presentations were followed by a questions and answers session.

Fabiola Gianotti introduced the new directorate - freshly appointed by the CERN Council -  discussed the financial situation of the Organization, the scientific strategy of the Laboratory for the 2021-2025 period and announced the imminent start of the construction of CERN Science Gateway. The meeting was also an opportunity to present the schedule for the restart of the accelerators as well as the latest findings by the experiments, among which LHCb’s time-dependent matter-antimatter asymmetry discovery and ATLAS and CMS’s detection of a Higgs boson’s decay into a pair of muons.

Much of the meeting was dedicated to the COVID-19 safety and HR-related measures dictated by the current health situation in the Member States and beyond. James Purvis and Doris Forkel-Wirth, Head of the HSE Unit, reasserted CERN’s foremost commitment to ensuring the safety of its community, highlighting that no evidence for on-site infections had been established since the start of the pandemic. Teleworking, leave management, the restaurant situation, quarantine and travel restriction rules were then addressed in detail during the questions and answers section.

You can consult the presentations and watch the full recording of the meeting here.