Alessandro Montanari
Senior researcher
National Institute for Nuclear Physics – INFN, Italy

I started windsurfing when I was 16 but had to stop because I didn’t have a car and I’m from a town not near a sea. I love it because you’re flying on the water without noise, just the wind and the sail and it’s beautiful. I tried again, 10 years or so ago, because some friends of mine were doing it, and haven’t stopped since! I like change and having new colleagues. DUNE is a new adventure, a new experiment. It still has to be designed so there is space for new ideas, new people. I’m working on the photon detection system for the far detector of DUNE. Since I was in high school, I’ve liked physics and loved big experiments. There was an experiment at CERN when I was young, UA1, that helped discover the W and Z bosons, and I was fascinated by this big machine—or what was a big machine at the time. To me it looked like some kind of cathedral and I was enthralled by the fact that humans were able to build such a sophisticated experiment.