University of Houston, United States
I am a scuba diver. My husband has been diving since he was 12, and he convinced me to try it out while we were dating and I enjoyed it. This greatly surprised my friends, because I am not a great swimmer! My husband proposed to me on a dive in Hawaii, and we spent our honeymoon diving shipwrecks off the coast of North Carolina. These days, my husband and I spend most of our free time hanging out with our daughter, who is 18 months old. She’s growing up so quickly, and it’s fun to watch her learn and figure things out.
Growing up, I never thought of being a scientist. I took a Modern Physics class in college, and I got really interested when we started talking about quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and particle physics. The idea that you could figure out how such tiny particles behave was intriguing. I think I was still a little skeptical about a career in physics, but once I got some research experience, I was convinced that this was what I wanted to do. DUNE is such a massive project. It is taking years to plan, will take years to build, and will hopefully run for decades. I feel lucky to have been a part of it from the very beginning, and it’s a little crazy to think I could be working on DUNE for the rest of my career!