University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
I’ve always enjoyed acting. It’s like free therapy; you start to think about the world in an entirely new way. I think it broadens your mind’s ability to do things. Because you have to break with who you are and think differently in order to act, you approach the world and problems in a new way. I think it pairs well with particle physics, where it is often necessary to find new approaches to problems, even when those approaches are unfamiliar to us.
I have always wanted to do research where I could help answer some of the big questions in the universe and make my own path. I fell in love with neutrino physics. There’s a great sense of excitement in the area – to think we might be able to understand whether neutrinos are the cause of the matter-dominated universe! It’s a huge draw for me. Even if you’re doing something mundane, like trying to work out how wide an experimental hall should be, it makes every discussion important and exciting. I was lucky enough to be part of the team that proved all three types of neutrinos change into one another back in 2011 with the T2K experiment. Now we have the opportunity to find out what effect neutrinos had on the creation of our universe. It is a very exciting time!