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I was born and grew up in Mons, Belgium, in a family of school teachers. I am the eldest of three sisters, one of whom trained as a translator and the other as a medical doctor. My father, who taught foreign languages all his active life, had developed a keen interest for mathematics and excelled at it at high school. He used to entertain us with maths puzzles at dinner time, and certainly was an early influence on my own mathematical journey. By the age of thirteen, I had decided to study Mathematics and become a teacher myself. By the age of twenty-one, then in my penultimate year of a Licence en Mathematiques at Mons University, I had discovered the beauty and power of symmetry through group theory and its application to theoretical particle physics. This is when the idea of furthering my studies and apply for a PhD emerged. I was awarded a 4-year Fellowship (Aspirant) from the Belgian Fonds National de Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) to embark on a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at Mons University under Jean Nuyts in October 1980, defended my thesis in February 1984 and continued my research as FNRS Chercheur Qualifie for another two years, being based in Mons but visiting the Theory Division of CERN in Geneva to develop new collaborations there. I accepted a one-year postdoc position at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in October 1986, and then moved to CERN in October 1987 as a postdoc. There I met my future husband, a theoretical particle physicist who was also a postdoc at CERN, and this event signalled the beginning of a two-body problem that required some careful planning to resolve. After two further years of postdoctoral research as Enrico Fermi Fellow at Chicago University, during which time my first child was born, we moved to Durham where my husband had been offered a Lectureship in Physics. I was awarded an SERC five-year fellowship in October 1991 and had my second child in 1993, was a temporary lecturer for one year, then a Leverhulme postdoc for another three years and became a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences in October 2000. I was promoted to Reader in 2004 and to a Chair in 2006. My scientific career has been guided by my interest in symmetries, mainly in the context of the collective pursuit of particle physicists to unify the four fundamental forces of Nature in a universal framework. This dream is fuelled by partial success provided by the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the recent discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson at CERN, but it is far from being fully realised. This is in spite of efforts by thousands of theoretical particle physicists, who have developed String Theory in the last 50 years in an attempt to unify gravity to the other three fundamental forces. What fascinates me in String Theory is that it offers an almost unlimited playground to develop ideas that can be explored with complementary tools such as group and representation theory, algebraic geometry and number theory. It provides a very fertile ground that continues to produce the unexpected. Back to Portraits |