Harvard University, United States
I grew up in a town of 600 people in northern Quebec, next to a racetrack. My three brothers and I would race old cars along that track in the summer. As I grew up in the countryside where the skies are very clear, I was interested from a young age in the mysteries of the universe and in understanding how the world around us works. My family was first-generation and low-income, and I never imagined the job prospects I would have studying physics. Now I am the installation liaison for the anode plane assembly for the DUNE detector. That means I work with the teams building the components and with the installation teams to make sure the designs on both sides agree. Being a professor at Harvard and working on neutrino detectors was not something that I thought I could do. My family is very proud of me, though they don’t understand quite what it is that I do. When I go home I still race sometimes, but my brothers, having continued to race while I was studying neutrinos, have gotten way better than me and I can’t really compete with them anymore.