Rutgers University, United States
I worked on the SNO+ experiment previously, and we had racks of electronics a mile underground. One Halloween, we decided to turn a rack into a skeleton. We bought a plastic head and arms and feet, and put some LED eyes in the skull so it would flash when there was a particle event. But one day we came down to the lab, and it was just gone. Walking around, I found the skull on a cart, and was waiting for someone to show up. The twist was that that day, there was a film crew underground filming a segment; they came by and I was standing there, cradling a skull.
Nowadays I’m involved with the Short-Baseline Near Detector, MicroBooNE, and R&D efforts for the DUNE near detector at Fermilab. I’m particularly interested in questions about instrumentation electronics, readout, and engineering, and searches for new physics. I never know from one day to the next if I’m going to be calculating, coding, or building something. I really like the variety and how collaborative it is – both in DUNE and in particle physics in general. It’s an amazing community of people from all over the world who come together and bring unique perspectives and expertise to build something incredible. The whole is much greater than the parts. It’s a beautiful thing.