University of Sussex, United Kingdom
When I was 18, I went to Australia for nine months on a working holiday visa. I wanted to travel and needed money. One of my jobs was driving a tractor from midnight to midday, seven days a week. Following that, while traveling up the Queensland coast, I started a game of chess with someone. After all the manual work, playing chess made my brain feel alive again. I knew what I had to have in my life: something where I got to solve complex problems and really think about things. That was a big motivator. Knowing where I wanted to go drove me to work hard to achieve it. I wanted to contribute something that would be lasting, and discover new things about the universe. For DUNE, I’ve been working on how we can record an immense amount of data if a star in the Milky Way goes supernova and creates lots of particle tracks in our detector. Our data acquisition system will have to be able to buffer 40 terabytes in 10 seconds. That’s like streaming 4 million TV shows simultaneously.