David Vanegas Forero
Theorist
University of Campinas, Brazil

Most of my colleagues do not know that when I was a teenager, I used to practice freestyle BMX. Many of my afternoons after school were spent on a bike. I learned a lot by assembling and tweaking my bike, and most of the places I know in my home city, Bogotá, I know them by bike. When I finished high school, I decided to try electronics engineering, but I couldn’t enter the college I wanted. The father of a friend of mine told me to enroll in physics, thinking I could take basic courses and change my focus later on. However, after starting physics classes, I decided not only to stay but also to enroll in theoretical physics. It’s one of the life-changing decisions I have made! That was 15 years ago. Now I work on phenomenology, which tries to connect what theorists predict with what experimentalists can measure.