Mary Bishai

Both my parents are engineers, so I have always had an interest in science. In 1985, when I was 15, I read an article in National Geographic about the Tevatron at Fermilab and the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN. I grew up in Egypt, and it was a big deal at the time that my parents forked out the money for a subscription to a foreign publication. There was no internet, and very limited science programming on the two broadcast channels, so no PBS, no Nature, no Cosmos. I wouldn’t have read about these machines otherwise. I decided right then that I wanted to be a particle physicist, and I still have that copy of the magazine. Thirteen years later I was a postdoc at Fermilab working on the Tevatron. I’ve been involved with DUNE since 2006 – I was a project scientist for LBNE, an early incarnation of the experiment – and now I am involved in developing DUNE’s long-term science plan, looking at physics beyond the standard model. I’m thinking about physics of neutrinos that we have not even imagined yet. I enjoy pushing boundaries, and using my own knowledge of the technical capabilities of the experiment to bring in new measurements and new ideas.