University of Campinas, Brazil
When I was a little kid, I dreamed of being an astronaut or an international spy, inspired by 007 movies. While studying physics during college in the early ‘90s, I had a punk rock band, Quasímodo Traça Jaguadarte, and recorded a CD, but a proposal to work at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy made me switch my attention from guitars to neutrino detectors. So the wiggly river of life brought me to physics, which made me as close to the stars as an astronaut and also gave me the chance to work in super cool laboratories like in 007 movies. Now I am doing research and development for DUNE’s photon detection system. It’s challenging to build a cutting-edge detector made with tens of thousands of tons of liquid argon deep underground. You have to interact with an enormous number of people with different cultures and visions of life and the universe.