Jae Yu
Dual-Phase ProtoDUNE
University of Texas at Arlington, United States

I was a really bad student in math and in physics. I hated physics. But in the early ’70s, the oil embargo impacted Korea very much because the country didn’t have any oil at all. So I wanted to do something related to energy. I didn’t know what, but I wanted to be working on something that would mean Korea didn’t have to rely on someone else. My senior year of high school my homeroom teacher was a physics teacher. In one class I learned about radioactive decays, and got really interested in the phenomenon. Something coming out of nothing. It also got me interested in mathematics. In one year I was able to turn into a ‘physics guy.’ All my teachers had given up on me but later on said I can make it. Well, I passed the 2 exams to get into college as a physics major. Ever since then I stayed in physics. I have also been very active in promoting cooperation between the US and Korea on science. I have served as the president of the Association of Korean Physicists in America (AKPA) and the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (KSEA), and recently organized a US-Korea conference with 1,500 participants.