Physics and journalism students from Dobie and South Houston high schools are among only five groups in the nation that were invited to participate in an international project to learn and report about a new super-collider project in Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN, an international physics consortium, is unveiling its new particle physics experiment – the Atlas Project. The consortium, the National Science Foundation and Quarknet, a national organization of universities, physics laboratories and high school teachers, have invited the students to Geneva to observe, learn and produce news reports on the project.

Dobie and South Houston will send a physics student, a journalism student, a student videographer and a physics teacher overseas to Geneva to participate in the project. Dobie students participating are Preston Andrews, Kelsey Kaiser, Hong Thai and science teacher Susan Fontanilla. South Houston students Nicole Neveu, Cindy Le, Jose Bermudez and physics teacher Jim Preston will also participate in the educational sessions.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for these students,” said Alena Grinstead, Pasadena ISD science instructional specialist. “They will be able to learn from some of the world’s top physicists and then share what they have learned with their classmates.”

The students from the two Pasadena ISD schools will act as news reporters to students in the community and across the nation and will chronicle the project through blogs, websites and videos.

The experiments will occur during CERN’s “Open Days” event, scheduled for April 5-6. During this time, the public will be able to view the Atlas experiment. The particle physics experiments are designed to examine the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that have shaped the universe. As part of the experiment, scientists are searching for the collisions of high-energy protons.

Students will visit the Atlas Project’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva that spans the border underground between Switzerland and France. The LHC is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy.

“This is a great honor for the students at both of these schools,” said Pasadena ISD Superintendent Dr. Kirk Lewis. “This is going to be an outstanding learning opportunity that they will remember for the rest of their lives.”