Butler native McBride receives CMU award
Butler native Patricia McBride didn't visit her hometown during a trip to Pittsburgh this past weekend, but it was a memorable visit nonetheless.
The 1973 Butler High School graduate was presented with an alumni award from Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in nuclear physics in 1977. McBride went on to receive a doctorate in physics from Yale University. She was also the guest speaker at the graduate student commencement known as the robing ceremony.
McBride received the Nelson Palmer Physics Award when she graduated from Butler High School. After getting her bachelor's degree from CMU, she received her master's and doctorate from Yale before the age of 30. She taught at Harvard University and worked at a super collider in Texas.
Today, McBride leads the Compact Muon Solenoid collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) lab in Geneva, Switzerland, and is a distinguished scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the U.S. Department of Energy's premier particle physics lab near Chicago.
McBride now calls Chicago home, but mostly lives in France near Geneva.It was a surprise to receive the award and be asked to speak to the graduates, she said.“It feels particularly nice when your own university recognizes you,” McBride said. “It's nice to be recognized, but it's particularly nice to be recognized by people from your roots.”She said her advice to students studying physics is to seek experience performing research, adding how such experiences best help prepare you for your career.Students should conduct an experiment or build something, analyze data and write a paper about it to gain experience, she said.Her work at CERN aims to discover more about matter and the universe.“It's a field that tries to understand the fundamental building blocks of matter. What is an electron? What is a proton? Why is there matter in the universe and not antimatter,” McBride said.She said the particle collider at CERN recreates what occurred in the universe following the Big Bang.“We design equipment to study particle collisions and compare the results to mathematical models,” McBride said. “What I do is a combination of building experiments with high-tech components and looking for deviations from things you know are correct.”
