Dear TAC-HEP Faculty,

I hope this email finds you well! I am a first year PhD student here at UW, writing to indicate my interest in the TAC-HEP program. Because I am interested in pursuing research in experimental HEP, and in particular computational aspects of such experiments, the goals of this traineeship align very well with my own personal research goals.

During my undergraduate studies, I worked for 2 years with Dr. David Miller's ATLAS group at the University of Chicago, performing early analysis of trigger algorithms for use in the HL-LHC era. A large part of that project involved designing custom plotting and analysis tools in Python and ROOT, so I came to appreciate both using the tools for analysis, as well as designing the software tools themselves. Prior to coming to UW, I worked professionally for 7 months as a software engineer, working on the Data Management team of the company's Center for High Performance Computing. I see TAC-HEP as a natural way to further my software engineering skills, and to simultaneously accomplish my graduate studies goal of building expertise in computing for HEP.

I am especially interested in the research project "Services and Tools for Analysis Facilities for the HL-LHC". This project seems to most directly combine my interests in software and physics data analysis, and I believe that project also best capitalizes on my prior work on ATLAS and data management. If possible, I would be very happy to talk to Professor Bose about the particulars of this project and how I could contribute.

Thank you for providing notice of this traineeship, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Best, Ryan Simeon