Toni Feder

What’s your worst nightmare? For astrophysicist Martin Rees, it’s an engineered pandemic or the breakdown of global networks for electricity and the internet—events that could produce a catastrophe on the global scale and even threaten human existence. “You can detect if someone is building a nuclear weapon,” he says, “but a lone person in a lab can create a pathogen.

The CERN Council in May agreed to move ahead with the 91-km-circumference electron–positron Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee). Now CERN has two-and-a-half years to see if it can scrape together 15.3 billion Swiss francs (about $19 billion) to realize the project by the mid 2040s.

“What can physicists do? ” is an interview series that profiles physicists who opted for careers outside of academia. Koloina Randrianarivony Senior financial officer, World Bank BS, physics, University of Antananarivo, 2000 Diploma, physics, Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 2002 PhD, physics, Syracuse University, 2008 What was your research focus? Experimental particle physics. As a postdoc, I was involved in the ATLAS collaboration at CERN.