Fermilab, United States
After six years at the Tevatron, spending countless numbers of hours trying to discover the Higgs Boson, I still remember staying up until 2 a.m. on July 4th, 2012. I had 20 friends over to my apartment, so we could all collectively watch the live stream of CERN’s announcement of the discovery of the Higgs. Even though they had ‘scooped us,’ it was still wonderful to have a bunch of colleagues who cheered on their competition. We all just loved the excitement of scientific discovery; whether it was CERN or Fermilab, we cared most about this incredible discovery and learning about it. Ego was set aside. One of the things that I love about DUNE is that it is such a large and long-term project, like the Tevatron and the LHC. We’ll answer very big questions that have come to the forefront of neutrino physics in the last 15 years, and it’s going to have real significance within the particle physics community. I think of it as neutrino science going big.