Vinod Chohan joined
CERN in January 1975 as a Fellow in the
Proton Synchrotron division. From 1977 to 1980 he worked at
Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research, in the Beam Dynamics Group of the Cyclotron Accelerator Division. In 1980, he returned to CERN as a staff member in the Proton Synchrotron division, under which he later worked with beam diagnostics and safety. During his nearly 40 years at CERN he has held various positions, such as Accelerator Operation Coordinator for the
Antiproton Accumulator Complex. This machine created
antiprotons for the
Super Proton Synchrotron, and was part of the infrastructure that led to the discovery of the
W and Z bosons for which
Carlo Rubbia and
Simon van der Meer received the 1984
Nobel Prize in Physics. During his tenure at
CERN, he was associated with
Fermilab for the commissioning of an antiproton source 1985 and 1986 and at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory where he collaborated on Proton Storage Ring in 1989. In 1993 he taught a course at the CERN Accelerator School on Accelerator Systems, held at the Centre for Advance Technology, Indore, India. In 2002, he joined the LHC Project team responsible for developing CERN's new project, the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Chohan led and managed the team responsible for testing hundreds of
superconducting magnets to be used in the collider. This was a tedious process: 1706 superconducting magnets – each 14 meters long — were to be tested. From the beginning of the testing in 2001 to 2002, only 21 magnets were tested, due to shortage of staff. The situation improved when one started recruiting personnel from India, for a year at the time, as part of the CERN-India Collaboration on LHC. and in 2008 he was featured in
BBC Horizon, a documentary television series. After the
LHC start-up in 2008, Chohan led the team responsible for technical coordination at all of CERN's accelerators and beam experimental areas, except for the LHC. Chohan became member of the
Institution of Engineering and Technology in 1981 and became a fellow in November 2013. ==Publications==