At the 88th LHCb Week, physics Ph.D. student Andrea Welsh will serve as a resource person on early-career, gender, and diversity issues.

"I will talk about mental health as it affects graduate students and physicists and offer some best practices to support those who experience mental health problems," she says.  

LHCb stands for Large Hadron Collider beauty. It is a special experiment investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the "beauty quark," or "b quark".

 About 700 scientists from 66 institutes and universities worldwide are involved in the experiment. Together they make up the LHCb collaboration. Collaboration members meet for a week every three months to discuss various issues concerning the science and the scientists. 

The 88th LHCb collaboration meeting, on June 11-15 2018, includes a session on early careers, gender, and diversity. Organizers have invited Andrea Welsh to participate in the session. Welsh is a Ph.D. student in the lab of School of Physics Professor Flavio Fenton.

Welsh is an advocate for mental health awareness, diversity and inclusiveness, and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).