Nicholas Hadley was elected to a third term as the Chair of the US CMS Collaboration Board. In this position, he will represent and lead the nearly 700 scientists, from 49 universities and national laboratories in the United States, who are members of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The United States is the largest national group in the CMS collaboration. US groups have made significant contributions to nearly every aspect of the detector throughout all phases of the experiment including construction, installation and physics analysis.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN smashes protons together at close to the speed of light with four times the energy of the most powerful accelerators built up to now. Some of the collision energy is turned into mass, creating new particles, which can be observed in the CMS particle detector. CMS data is analyzed by scientists around the world to build up a picture of what happened at the heart of the collision. This experiment will help us answer questions such as: "what is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it?" and "what gives everything substance?" Such research increases our basic understanding and may also spark new technologies.