Indiana University, United States
I always liked science and identified with sciencey characters in the kids’ cartoons I watched growing up, and I liked math, so physics seemed like a natural direction. DUNE is a challenging project with many different facets; it’s fun to work with individuals with a wide range of backgrounds who bring unique perspectives and skills to the challenge. In 2003, when I was working on the CLEO experiment, one of our competitors discovered a new particle with unexpected properties. Several of my fellow CLEOns and I were in a position to confirm it, and we did it within a week. We also found a signal pointing to a second new state within another week. The paper was written and submitted to Physical Review Letters D within a month from when we started. That’s never happened before — it was so fast. In that month, while in the thick of it, reasoning through the problems and checking everything, literally thousands of emails were exchanged. We finally concluded that the new particle was indeed there.