María José Costa Mezquita is a scientific researcher at the CSIC and will be responsible for governing this experiment. Her field of research is experimental particle physics in high-energy colliders. She will be in charge of an international scientific team with personnel from 42 countries. A Valencian scientist has just to be elected president of the Collaboration Council of the ATLAS experiment, one of the two large detectors of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the largest particle accelerator in the world. María José Costa Mezquita is a scientific researcher at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) and will be responsible for governing this experiment, where the Higgs boson was discovered a decade ago. Her mandate will begin within from little, in 2023 as deputy president, to go on to lead the Council for two years, in 2024 and 2025. The ATLAS Collaboration Council is responsible for making all scientific and technical decisions, as well as ensuring effective collaboration and harmonious among its members. It is the governing body of a collaboration that brings together more than 5,500 scientists, engineers and technicians from 181 institutions in 42 countries. In Spain, in addition to the IFIC, the Institute of Microelectronics (IMB-CNM-CSIC), the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), both from Barcelona, and the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) participate. What the Council does The Council that Costa Mezquita will preside over is the body that decides on: the operating strategy of the experiment, the physics program to follow, changes or improvements to the detector (a complex device 46 meters long and weighing 7,000 tons, similar to the weight of the Eiffel Tower), finances or personnel policy. The president of the Council together with the spokesperson (spokesperson), who leads the execution of the activities of the experiment, are the highest representatives of ATLAS. Currently its spokesperson is Andreas Hoecker (CERN), with whom the CSIC scientist will collaborate closely in the coming years. They have chosen it in a vote of the members. To elect the president of this organization, the members of the collaboration can propose a person; a selection committee receives the nominations and makes a selection from a short list of candidates, then the Collaboration Council (181 people, one for each scientific institution in ATLAS) selects one of the candidates after a vote. The result of the vote in which María José Costa was elected became official on October 19. “It is a great honor to have been chosen as the next president of the Council of the ATLAS Collaboration during the exciting and challenging period that lies ahead”, declared María José Costa Mezquita after being elected. The challenges she facesThe scientist is aware that his new position comes to him at a difficult moment of world crisis and that is why he asks for maximum collaboration. “The successful operation of our experiment throughout Run 3 of the LHC, the maximum exploitation of the data collected and the work required to meet the ambitious detector upgrade program for the High Luminosity LHC are tremendous challenges to be addressed.” , and all of them must be carried out in a new scenario in which global tragedies such as the covid-19 pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine or the energy crisis have affected our way of living and our priorities in life. keep the collaboration united and motivated, maintaining and even improving its attractiveness to young scientists, engineers and technicians, but also to our more experienced colleagues A respectful and diverse collaboration in which all members feel involved in the decision-making process decisions and duly recognized for their contribution must continue to be our guide”, he said. A scientist with extensive experience María José Costa Mezquita (València, 1974) is a scientific researcher at the CSIC at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics, a center of which she was deputy director during 2015-2019, she is also the coordinator of the strategic theme of the CSIC Understanding the basic components of Universe, its structure and evolution, and member of the Executive Committee of the CPAN (National Center for Astroparticle and Nuclear Particle Physics). Her field of research is experimental particle physics in high energy colliders. In this field, she has participated in the two large accelerators at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory based in Geneva (Switzerland): the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) and its successor, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He completed his doctoral thesis at LEP in 2003, and joined the LHC ATLAS experiment in 1997 to contribute to the design and construction of one of its components, the silicon trace detector, as part of the IFIC group, a pioneer in this technology in Spain. .During his postdoctoral stay at CERN, he played an important role in preparing the ATLAS experiment for the start-up of the LHC, coordinating the fine-tuning of the collision reconstruction software. Since joining the IFIC in 2008, she has focused on exploiting the data collected by the experiment. Her greatest impact has been the study of the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle known, also acting as coordinator of the quark physics group top of ATLAS during 2011-2013. In the last four years she has co-directed the IFIC ATLAS project dedicated to the operation and analysis of the experiment data, with an emphasis on the physics of the Higgs boson and the top quark. Her election as chair of the ATLAS Collaboration marks a four-year term, beginning in January 2023 as deputy chair, moving to chair for two years in 2024 and 2025, returning to vice chair again in 2026. As President replaces Lucia Di Ciaccio (Université de Savoie-LAPP). In the past, two IFAE researchers held the position: Martine Bosman and Matteo Cavalli-Sforza. Teresa Rodrigo, from the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA, CSIC-UC), was also president of the Council of CMS, the other great experiment of the LHC.