Michigan State University, United States
I’m a qualified ski instructor; I took a year off after undergrad and went and skied for a year. I also work on an experiment in Japan, T2K, and the skiing in Japan is insane. I’m there for physics, and it’s a work hard, play hard kind of thing. With DUNE, I mainly work on trying to understand how neutrinos interact with matter. We’re trying to work out properties of the neutrinos themselves, and the only way we see them is when they hit something. At the near detector, we want to see what the beam looks like when we’ve just produced it – and then we want it to travel for 800 miles and measure it at the far detector and see how it changed. All the work that I’ve done prior to working on DUNE was on an experiment that’s pretty established, so there are ways of doing things. You can try to do new things, but you can’t rebuild the experiment. So, the fact that with DUNE we’re able to go, ‘Well, what if we did this – how might that help us in 10 years?’ is very different and quite exciting. Physics is really where it’s at. It’s kind of the melding of doing awesome math and using that to understand the universe. And also getting to poke the universe and see what happens.