University of Minnesota, United States
I spent 28 years going a half mile underground every day to build the MINOS, CDMS, and Soudan detectors, and the last 8 years building and operating the NOvA Far Detector. I’ve dedicated my whole life to making physicists happy—they come with these crazy ideas and we try to make them happen. I worked on the mechanical tests for how ProtoDUNE goes together at the NOvA lab in Ash River, Minnesota, and spent a year and a half assembling the pieces that were delivered to CERN. It’s a great group of people that we worked with at CERN. It’s a family. It’s like the old collaborations when you knew everybody and their children and had potluck dinners together. There’s a real camaraderie that’s not always present in these large collaborations. I really enjoy getting together with people outside of the work environment. I think you end up ultimately getting a much better product when you’re all working together. I’ll be around to help develop the installation procedures for DUNE, but in theory I’ll retire before they build the first detector. I’ll have to come back and see it.