Colorado State University, United States
I became interested in science pretty early. In elementary school in England, I had a friend who was also dead keen on science. We would just talk about science, and he found books – I vividly remember one about nuclear physics, I can still picture the cover in my mind’s eye. Of course, we had no real idea what the books were talking about, but they had really neat pictures and we would fill in the gaps of what we understood by making stuff up. He was a math whiz, and it’s because of him that I switched from studying chemistry (my best subject) to an extra math course in high school so that I just did math and physics the last two years of high school, which undoubtedly set me on a course to where I am today.
Later on, as an undergraduate in university, I saw a poster about doing graduate study at Purdue University in the US. I knew nothing about Purdue except that it was not too far from Fermilab, which I had learned about in a particle physics course. So, I filled out the attached postcard, and they wrote back (an actual letter) and said they would give me money! We didn’t have teaching assistantships in the UK, and the idea of taking more physics courses and teaching sounded really great to me. As it turned out, after my coursework I ended up being shipped out to SLAC in California to work on one of the first Positron Electron Project (PEP) experiments and later was involved in a CP violation project called BABAR. Understanding how CP violation is related to the fundamental structure of the universe became a central theme of my career. After we understood that CP violation in the quark sector couldn’t explain the antimatter-matter asymmetry I joined the T2K neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan, and that led naturally to DUNE. And as a bonus, I will search for sterile neutrinos with ICARUS in the Short Baseline Neutrino program at Fermilab.