Vaia Papadimitriou
LBNF/DUNE Beamline and Associate Director of Accelerator Division
Fermilab, United States

During college and at the beginning of my graduate studies, I was interested in solid-state physics, which focused more on how materials worked and how we could use their properties to build powerful devices. For my Ph.D. thesis, I switched to particle physics, which is fundamental physics. It’s more philosophical in that we are trying to understand the building blocks of matter, the forces in nature, how the world was created, and why things happen the way they do. In the course of studying that, we are practically exploring and advancing many other areas. For example, the World Wide Web and MRI machines started in particle physics. DUNE is amazing because we can study many neutrino oscillation-related aspects all in the same experiment. We don’t have to depend on other experiments. We can study the neutrino mass ordering, we can study CP violation, we can study the three-flavor neutrino oscillation paradigm – all in one.