Professor Ivica Puljak, Ph.D. is a regular professor of physics on the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Split. He obtained a degree in electrical engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, a master's degree in particle physics at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb and a doctor's degree in physics at the Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University in Paris. He has completed his doctoral thesis at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaise near Paris. He is a member of the CMS and MAGIC collaborations, his specific research field being the search for the Higgs boson and astroparticle physics. He is active in the promotion and popularisation of science.

Plenary presentation: "A Lot of Data, a Lot of Questions and Some Answers: Discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN"

Particle physics is a contemporary name for our continuous efforts towards a better understanding of nature, from its smallest to its largest scale. Although our efforts in this field are already far advanced, there are still many unanswered questions, for example: How was the universe created? What does it consist of? How will it end? How do particles get their mass? Why does nature consist of particles and where did the antiparticles go? In the period from 2010 - 2012, the Large Hadron Collider, LHC collected approximately 70 petabytes of data, which is more than contained in all books written in the history of mankind, in all languages. By analysing this huge amount of data, the scientists which work in collaborations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva are trying to find answers to the mentioned questions, but also to many others. One of the answers to the question about particle mass can already be discerned. The key to the answer is the so-called Higgs boson, which was discovered in 2012 and is currently being tested for its characteristics.