University of Houston, United States
I have a horse named Lupita. I’m from Mexico, and my mom’s house is close to stables, so I grew up seeing horses around. I thought that I’d like to have a horse one day, and when I moved to Texas, I knew it was my opportunity. So I’ll code and do physics for work and then go riding in my spare time. My work on DUNE looks at proton decay, a really rare process. It would be a great discovery if it happened, and many grand unification theories predict it. I’m also involved in the ProtoDUNE data analysis. I originally entered college for engineering, but I fell in love with physics. When I went to grad school, I came to Fermilab and put my hands on a real experiment – the MINERvA experiment. I said, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life: particle physics.’