A History of International Research Networking: The People who Made it Happen

Beatrice Bressan is responsible for the outreach of the TOTEM experiment at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, and is also a science writer. She has more than ten years of experience in the field of scientific and technological communication with extensive experience in journalism, media publishing and public relations. She is a Member of the European Union of Science Journalists' Associations (EUSJA). After her University studies in mathematical physics and science communication, she completed her Ph.D. research and carried out a postdoctoral fellowship on knowledge management and knowledge transfer inside CERN for the Department of Physical Sciences at Helsinki University. She has worked within the Technology Transfer group at CERN, taking care of the production of promotional material, at SIB (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) as Head of Communications, and at the Department of Physics at Geneva University, being responsible for their communications. Through her work, she aims to give a better understanding of complex scientific and technological topics for politicians, industrialists and the general public.

Howard Davies has a First Class Honours degree in Engineering Science and a D.Phil from the University of Oxford. From 1964 to 1977, he worked in the DD (Data Handling) Division of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, initially as a Scientific Programmer, later as a Group Leader and Project Manager for CERNnet. Between 1977 and 1993, he was Director of the Computer Unit at the University of Exeter, responsible not only for the provision of computing services to all academic department within the University but also for the development of network-based services based on the use of JANET and its successors. During this period, he spent six months sabbatical leave in 1986 as a Visiting Computer Specialist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford, California; he acted as (part-time) Director of the Interim COSINE Project Management Unit from 1989 to 1991 and from 1992 to 1994 was Vice-President of RARE. He was appointed Joint General Manager of DANTE in 1993. He retired at the end of 2001.