Joshua Thompson
PhD student
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

I enjoy making homemade beer. I have made some quite good stuff, I have to say; I’ve certainly bought worse. There’s a fantastic beer industry that really has come out in the last few years in the UK. I intend to make more when I get back there—but I’ve been at CERN for six months, which is where I’ve wanted to be for most of my life. I tried to read Stephen Hawking’s ‘The Universe in a Nutshell’ at the age of 10, and a remarkable amount of it made sense to me. I thought, ‘This is it.’ It was around the time that the LHC was getting started, and that reinforced going into physics for me. Just before I finished university, I got into neutrino physics. I work on ProtoDUNE, better understanding how we reconstruct particle events in the detector. It’s a good community of people; everybody helps each other along a lot. I’ve wanted to do physics for a very long time, so it’s all coming together.