Beauty not only has its own focus, but also its moment in time. Its here and now. This is how Carmen, a Senior Business Analyst working at the ESA Estates and Facilities Management Department, perceives beauty.
“It is the result of our stubborn human determination to push the limits of the possible”, she ensures. Beauty as a product of our curiosity, the same one that led Carmen to join CERN in 1999.
Her time as a CERNie coincided with the LHC construction. Carmen worked for about 6 years as a telecommunication engineer in the Monitoring and Supervision Group and in the Cooling and Ventilation Group of the Technical Support Department, contributing to the supervision of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator construction.
She is from Barcelona, where Gothic and Gaudí’s architecture dance in tandem, around many tourists. It was there that she studied a Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC).
There, too, her career started in the domain of industrial automation, but it was at CERN that she had her first experience in an international organisation primarily devoted to science and technology. A unique place to dare to ask questions. A place to be curious.
In 2005, Carmen decided to cross to the other bank of her professional sea. She continued her career at ESA, where until recently she has been Space Transportation Infrastructure Office Manager and a member of the Ariane 6 Launch Base Project.
To her, ESA is connected to the international cooperation put at the service of space research and technologies in Europe, in the same way that CERN is linked to the international cooperation put at the service of fundamental physics scientific research. No matter where, Carmen has always been clear about her work philosophy: to bring relevance and meaningfulness.
Since she was a kid, she has always been a great reader. She particularly likes History and political philosophy books. To her, humanities are intrinsic to everyone (just look at their name!). We grow with them, we live with them.
Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist who was one of the pioneer to create environmental awareness, wrote in Silent Spring (1962) that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction”.
Like Carson, Carmen is a nature lover, convinced that our big challenge is to save the planet and its biodiversity. That is why when she grows up she would like to work for the benefit of environmental and human-rights protection, always having time to enjoy hiking, surrounded by her loved ones.
And that is that “those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts”. And Carmen always contemplates it, at every here and now.