University of Cincinnati, United States
My fascination with science started when I was 7 years old in Portugal. I wanted to be an astronomer, but my friends just kept asking me to write them their horoscopes. During my teenage years I was an avid reader of books on cosmic evolution, with one of my favorites being “Atoms of Silence” by Hubert Reeves. Learning about the ‘cosmic jazz,’ as he called it, made me want to go beyond looking at the stars and understand how stars work instead, and realize physics gave us these amazing tools to help us understand reality. There’s still so much we don’t understand about neutrinos. This is a particle that no one knew existed until the 1930s, and yet there’s so much we can learn from it about the universe’s evolution. I am the beyond-the-standard-model physics co-convener for DUNE, which means I work with a very diverse group of experimentalists, phenomenologists, and theorists to try to understand the wide landscape of physics we can probe with such a complex machine for discovery. It has been a fantastic opportunity to work with people from all over the world.