University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Even as a child I would take things to pieces to see how they worked, or to try to fix them. I still do so today, although when I tried to repair a heating system recently it ended up like The Poseidon Adventure. At the moment I’m the project engineer for UK activities on the data acquisition system for DUNE. Big, long-time-scale stuff. It’s a fun time to be involved with DUNE, since we’re kicking around ideas of how to make the system work. However, my first and enduring love in physics is small-scale detector and readout development. It is a great feeling when you have taken a prototype to a test facility and it starts to work. This always seems to happen at about 3 a.m. on the last day of your time-slot on the beam-line. So, it’s a mix of sleep deprivation and euphoria. And it’s possible the euphoria comes from sleep deprivation.