University of Bristol, United Kingdom
I am a dreamer and sci-fi pop-culture buff. When I am not in the lab, you will find me reading comics in a bookstore or desperately searching for that book which went out of publication a decade ago. Despite pursuing a different career — as a software engineer — in my early twenties, I have always dreamed of becoming a physicist. The big machines in experimental particle physics fascinated me. So one fine day, I gathered all the courage and took the plunge. I got an opportunity to do research and earn a Ph.D. on the CMS experiment. DUNE is the next mega level experiment in particle physics. I find it amazing to be a part of this project from the very beginning; we design it, and we figure out how we can do it. The sense of adventure and thrill of building new things is just incredible. At the moment, I am a team member for UK activities on the data acquisition system for DUNE. My role is to develop a firmware to process the tremendous amount of data coming from the DUNE far detector and generating a trigger or a decision on storing it. It will be continuous data taking for a decade or more, with minimal downtime. To achieve that we will need a robust and efficient data acquisition system and we are working towards it.