Known as Particle Clara for her science engagement videos on TikTok, Dr Clara Nellist explains that CERN’s particle physics work is for everyone.
When she was in her teens, Dr Clara Nellist’s school in Coventry didn’t have a dedicated physics teacher. It was her parents who, upon realising their daughter was interested in physics, took the initiative and enrolled Nellist in a class at a different school.
From her workspace at the Geneva headquarters of CERN, Nellist, now a particle physicist, tells us what a fortuitous decision her parents made.
“I was very fortunate that my dad is very interested in physics and astronomy, and my mum is a school teacher. When I was going to pick my A-levels and decide which science to do, physics wasn’t even on the list of ones that I could pick and my mum was asking, ‘Well, what about physics?’”
The teenage Nellist was reluctant to leave her school and her friends just so she could learn physics, so they found a workaround.
“It turned out I could go to a different secondary school to do those lessons because I didn’t want to leave my school. I had my friends, I wasn’t ready to go away. So, fortunately, I was able to go to a different school twice a week to do my physics lessons, and I really started to enjoy getting a better understanding of how things worked there.”
Nellist loved physics so much that by the time she was picking courses for university, she was between physics and English literature. “In the end, I went for the physics side, mainly because I felt English literature was something I could still pursue outside of university. It was still quite accessible whereas in physics I really needed a lab and the facilities in order to be able to do it at university level.”
Finding her niche in particle physics
How did she get into particle physics? Some people who consume scientific content on TikTok and YouTube might know Nellist as Particle Clara for her science videos in which she talks about working at CERN among other topics. It’s probably fair to say that particle physics isn’t a well-advertised career field, and this is something Nellist knows herself – and indeed is part of the reason for Particle Clara, but more on that later.
Initially, Nellist thought she would go into astronomy because that was the side of physics that most people, including her, knew the most about. But, later on, while doing her master’s, she got the opportunity to work with “actual data from a particle accelerator”, which was a game changer.
“One of the things I really loved about that project was that this was a study that nobody else had done yet, so they were looking for people to contribute to ongoing research.”
She was sent over to the US, to CERN’s equivalent, Fermilab. “I got to work in this international environment with people from all over the world on data from the collider, and that was when I got hooked. I was like, ‘I really want to do this for as long as they keep letting me, basically’.”
Discovering TikTok in a pandemic
Nowadays, Nellist is paying it forward by helping to encourage other peoples’ interest in particle physics – when she’s not working at CERN or teaching at the University of Amsterdam, that is. Like her mum, she’s clearly passionate about education, and she knows that science is not accessible to a lot of people. Is that why she decided to join TikTok?
She jokes that at one point she was the only CERN scientist active on the platform. “It was intentional,” she says of the decision to bring particle physics to social media users. “But it was also fortuitous because it was during lockdown and I had locked down with my mum in the UK – usually I’m either in Amsterdam or Geneva – but because of the lockdown I ended up staying with my parents.”
“As far as I knew when I started, TikTok was a dance platform for music and fun,” Nellist admits. But when her mum downloaded it during lockdown, they discovered that there was a lot more to it.
“The algorithm very quickly learns what you like, and there’s a lot of educational content on the platform. So, the algorithm started learning that my mum likes history. My mum likes tours of cities to find new places to visit, and volcanoes and things like that. So, I started to see a lot of educational content come up on the platform.”
Telling her followers about CERN
One of the people she found was an astrophysicist in Australia called Astro Kirsten, “who was making fantastic astrophysics content”. Nellist realised that there was a real appetite for science communication, particularly among young people who might not know a lot about CERN. Nellist says that CERN does excellent science communication initiatives that people follow but it can be difficult to reach youngsters as they don’t actively seek out the information.
To Nellist, TikTok seemed like an opportunity to “kind of go somewhere where people aren’t necessarily expecting to get CERN content and kind of offer it up there and say, ‘Hey, does anybody want to learn about what’s happening at CERN here?’”
They did, and she now has more than 200,000 TikTok followers. “It was a really nice thing to see that there was this whole new, enthusiastic audience that just hadn’t realised that they could ask questions about CERN,” she says.
Asking questions
People ask everything from really deep philosophical questions to technical questions and practical ‘working-life’ questions. Many want live streams and a look at the Large Hadron Collider. Nellist tells her followers that they can come to Geneva and book a tour of CERN if they want to see the particle accelerator in person.
She also points out that CERN does virtual tours as “not everybody can afford to go to Geneva”. Experiences like virtual tours help reach people from lots of different backgrounds and different countries. “One of the things I love about CERN is the fact that it’s so international,” says Nellist. “There are people from over 100 different countries working at CERN. When we go for lunch, you can hear almost every different language being spoken in the cafeteria. And there’s a lot of science diplomacy that goes on. That’s one of the reasons CERN was founded in the 50s was to bring people from different countries together after the Second World War, and have people working on something peacefully.”
Humanising the science
She says she’s proud to be part of the bigger picture of CERN. “It’s something I like for my working career, that I get to focus on not only understanding how the universe works but the fact that the lab brings people together.” That included teens who use TikTok.
“I think it’s really helpful to humanise the science to show the process, to show that there are a lot more stages to science and also that we need people from lots of different backgrounds, that we need people with creative thinking, who are going look at a problem in a different way. There is a place for everybody within science,” says Nellist. From personal experience as a teenager who had to jump through hoops to get the education she wanted, outreach and education will always be important topics to her.
“The most important messages to me are the ones where people send me private messages that said ‘I didn’t think I could do this kind of work, but seeing what you’re doing has made it more real’. That makes everything completely worth it.”
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