Flu reporting goes digital

Employees can now report flu-like symptoms to the Medical Office online by completing this questionnaire.

Medical Office employees created the form to help them handle the increasing number of calls from employees reporting flu-like symptoms.

The page-long questionnaire asks for the same information Medical Office employees request from callers. This includes: where the sick employee has been working for the past week, when the onset of symptoms began, whether a personal physician has diagnosed the illness and what the employee's symptoms have been.

The Medical Office may call to follow up with employees who fill out the online form. Please call the Medical Office at x3232 before returning to work after you have been sick with flu-like symptoms.

Filling out the questionnaire does not obviate the need to inform your supervisor that you will be out of the office. Please let him or her know as well.

Please contact the Medical Office through the online form or by phone at x3232 if you or a member of your family exhibits flu-like symptoms such as fever, sore throat, cough, stuffy nose, chills, headache, body aches, nausea, vomiting or diarrhea.

For more information, see Fermilab's flu information site.

Two particle accelerators,
one Higgs search

Aurelio Juste, the current co-convener of the Higgs Group at DZero, will leave Fermilab Nov. 1 for Barcelona.

If physicists find the Higgs boson in the next few years, Aurelio Juste will be part of the action.

Juste, a Fermilab scientist currently serving as co-convener of the Higgs Group at DZero, will leave Fermilab on Nov. 1 for Barcelona, where he will work for both Fermilab and CERN in the search for the Higgs. He will take a senior research position with ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) and IFAE (Institute for High Energy Physics), where he will join ATLAS, as well as continue his involvement at DZero.

Juste said having both laboratories in the search will lead to synergies, but as a physicist here for the past 11 years, he still is rooting for Fermilab to find the Higgs first.

"Right now my heart is at Fermilab, so I do hope we find the Higgs here. Whether that is the case or not, the LHC will enjoy an interesting future," Juste said.

Juste, who grew up in Barcelona, plans to split his time between both laboratories. After living and working at Fermilab for more than a decade, Juste has strong ties to the area.

"All of my career has been here, so Fermilab will always be a very special place for me," Juste said.

His career at Fermilab began in the years leading up to Run 2 of the Tevatron, where Juste helped construct the silicon detector for DZero. Eventually he became convener of the Top Physics and Jet Energy Scale working groups at DZero and served as physics coordinator for the last two years.

Of all his time at Fermilab, Juste said, the beginning of Run 2 was a particularly exciting period. Juste hopes to exceed that excitement in the coming years, as both the Tevatron and the LHC sprint in the search for the Higgs boson and other new phenomena.

"I'm sure a very exciting time will come through with the Higgs," Juste said. "The best is yet to come."

— Chris Knight

Marianne Champion

Marianne Champion, a mechanical engineer in the Accelerator Division, died last week. Colleagues are holding a memorial service today at noon.

Marianne Champion, whose generous personality, genuine interest in other people, and laugh made her instantly likeable, died last week. She was 48 years old.

People found it easy to become friends with Champion, who was a mechanical engineer in the Accelerator Division's Mechanical Support Department. She created long-lasting connections everywhere she went, said colleague Christine Ader, who knew Marianne for 15 years.

"I never met anyone who could make me laugh like she did," Ader said. "She was just a happy person and she would always smile or wave at people."

One of Champion's primary responsibilities was keeping the target pile dehumidifying system in the NuMI target hall operational, which presents a challenge because it is 120 feet underground. She also worked on Florinert Fluid System for the Main Injector Accelerator.

"She made work fun," said NuMI Shutdown Coordinator Michael Andrews. "When things break, it gets tense; you need to get things back online. And she'd always take the edge off with humor."

Colleagues remembered her smiling face and her contagious laugh.

"She had an office next to mine separated by a cinder block wall, but I could always tell when she was in her office because of her wonderful laugh," said Fermilab's Patrick Hurh.

She had worked at Argonne National Laboratory, Corning Fiber Optics and Oak Ridge National Laboratory before coming to Fermilab in 2006. She always spoke fondly of her lake house in Tennessee, where she enjoyed gardening. She did not speak fondly of Chicago's winters.

Champion volunteered at the Chicago Animal Care and Control - she loved Schnauzers - and enjoyed the opera. She always tried to help others, said coworker Maurice Ball, giving time or donations in unexpectedly generous ways.

She is survived by her three children, Nicholas Ferguson, Alex Ferguson, Lori Wiseman née Cox, her brother and sister-in-law Michael and Ann Byram, and also Mark Champion.

Colleagues will hold a memorial service for Champion at noon today in the Huddle Conference Room. Memorial services will take place at 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 2 at 110 Sugarwood Dr., Knoxville, Tenn. Read her full obituary here.

— Chris Knight

Gamma-ray restricts ways to beat Einstein's relativity

Sometimes a single photon can tell us a lot. Especially when it comes barreling toward us with extremely high energy from a gamma-ray burst billions of light-years away. If you catch just the right photon in just the right way, it might even tell you something about the fundamental structure of space-time and provide guidance toward unifying gravity and quantum physics.

In a paper first published on the arXiv on August 13, and then published in Nature, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team presents a reconstruction of the gamma-ray burst GRB090510, observed on May 10, 2009. The burst included a 31 GeV photon, one of the highest-energy photons ever observed from a gamma-ray burst. Although no grand sweeping statements can be made, this observation does place some limits on the kinds of theories physicists can develop about the nature of space-time.

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