Michigan State University, United States
I got hooked on science in the 5th grade. My class teacher put out equipment – wire, batteries, lights – that we could play around with after class to explore electricity. If something didn’t work, we had to figure it out. I thought of modeling a set of street lights and hooked the lights up properly in parallel, but the lights got dimmer the further they were from the battery. In desperation I cut the loop at the end of the source wire, which eliminated the short circuit, and, literally, the lights came on. From there on my goal was to take on challenges and figure out how to make things work. Now I’m working on DUNE, and I work on the cold electronics that we will use to extract images of neutrino interactions inside of huge liquid-argon detector. I’ve been working on the liquid-argon detector technologies for close to 20 years, and the plans for the ultimate neutrino detector are finally coming to fruition.