Claire was 16 when she first heard about particles and forces on a black-and-white TV: a science communicator was enthusiastically talking about the Big Bang, about being made of stardust, and about “grand unification.” After completing her studies at Université Paris-Saclay, she chose a PhD on the Fréjus underground laboratory experiment, which was searching for proton decay—one of the signatures of those inspiring models. It is a story she never forgets when she visits schools.

Her favourite message: follow your dreams, and enjoy the path.

She joined France’s largest institute in the field, IJCLab, and worked on detector components at Oxford and DESY (for the H1 experiment), at CERN and Padova (for the DELPHI experiment), before finally settling at CERN with the ATLAS collaboration, when the detector was still under construction. She led its outreach group for several years and met most of the IPPOG core team along the way.

Being chosen by the IPPOG Collaboration as Chair for 2023–2025 was an opportunity to give back what she had received, to foster and open up the Forum in synergy with the Representatives, and to highlight the strength and dedication of the entire community at a time when the future of particle physics was being discussed. Claire has now joined the FCC project, but remains fully active in IPPOG’s resource portal, the youngest of IPPOG’s three flagship activities.