Fermilab, United States
I studied physics and French in college. This worked really well for me – I loved learning physics and solving problems, but I also loved having to read a romantic French novel after a while! Later, I got my masters and worked on electromagnetic calorimeters at SLAC and CERN, then worked for a few years in the software industry. That’s when I started writing documentation and discovered that I liked it. But I prefer a lab environment, so I came to Fermilab and have been writing and editing here for many years now – lots of things, like documentation, design reports, and web sites. Because of my background, I usually know which questions to ask to get things right.
This year I’ve been leading the technical editing team for DUNE’s technical design report, working with the content contributors and the scientists who are leading the overall effort. The TDR describes in great detail the detectors that DUNE is going to build – what the components are and how they work, as well as how they get built, assembled, and installed. It also describes the physics we want to get out of the experiment, and what strategies we’ll use to do it. The editing team provides the guidance and the infrastructure in which to put all this content, we review and edit the text, and generally keep everything coordinated. It’s been quite a ride!