Daniel Douglas
Graduate student working on the DUNE-PRISM near detector
Michigan State University, United States

I’ve been cycling for several years now, but I started getting more serious about it this year. I rode my first metric century and it was a lot of fun. It takes my mind off of work and it lets me get outside and explore my surroundings. Plus, it’s just plain fun to find a nice hill and go really, really fast. I also like to do my own maintenance when I can. Maybe that’s because it’s a relatively simple machine, so I can make a lot more headway working on it than I can on a neutrino detector. For DUNE, I’m working on DUNE-PRISM. The idea is to build a detector close to the neutrino source at Fermilab that can move, which means we can put it in different places relative to the neutrino beam. This lets us examine different things about the beam passing through it, and helps us deal with some of the uncertainties we have in our models of neutrinos interacting with atoms. I am really happy to have the opportunity to contribute in my small way to such an ambitious experiment. My selfish goal is to learn something that no one has ever learned before. Then I’ll share it with my collaborators, of course!