CMS Data Analysis School 2025 @ DESY & UHH

Last week we held the 2025 CMS Data Analysis School or CMSDAS at DESY. This event saw about 70 new members of the CMS collaboration come to Hamburg for an opportunity to learn how to use general and collaboration-specific tools needed to contribute to CMS measurements.

I facilitated one of the “long exercises” in which students spend multiple days working on an intensive research problem to perform a realistic measurement on real data. I was also in charge of the documentation website for all long exercises, thanks to my experience with .md-based websites deployed from github/gitlab repositories–like this one! And so I got to choose a nice indigo color scheme… Both the exercise and the documentation are the result of 3 years of refinement after teaching versions of it in 2023 and 2024.

Check out an official DESY Instagram post about the event here. Or even better, if you are a CMS member, you can view the full long exercise I helped design and work through it at this CMS internal page

Special thanks to my students–in 3 years of facilitating these exercises, this might have been the best and most dedicated group I have had yet!