The Women who run the biggest machine ever built by Man
The complexity of LHC and the women in charge of it
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Stefania is a researcher at the INFN in Bologna, the city in which she studied, got her masters and her Ph.D. Her scientific curiosity took her to the US for a few years, where she became interested in physics applied to medicine. At present she is collaborating with the physicists of Ferrara, dealing mostly with software development, data analysis and simulation, areas that are closely connected to experimental physics, which have always interested her and which she feels she tackles well.
She's working along the same lines now for the LHC adventure. Her tasks involve the development of software that uses muon traces to keep an eye on any possible disalignment of the detectors, and feasibility studies of some of the crucial measurements in the initial operating phase of LHCb.

"I have a physicist husband who shares with me scientific challenges and those of daily life: we're equally involved in physics and family, and we both take care of our two children Francesco and Andrea. When physics takes over, in those incandescent moments during which experiments "burn" for both of us, well, then we have to make use of the grandparents."