University of Pennsylvania, United States
I work on particle physics because I want to understand how the universe works, how things are put together, and how they function at the most basic level. I’m fortunate to do this as a vocation; it has taken me all over the world. When I was a student working on the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan, a friend and I visited a local pub-style place. It came time to order, and the people around us stopped talking. I think they wanted to hear if I could speak Japanese; I could. I ordered, and people started talking to me, buying us drinks, and then took us to another pub where they wouldn’t let us pay for anything. Then they took us to another place. I ended up meeting a bunch of people from a very small town in a remote part of Japan. Because of their work with the mining company there, they’d lived all over the world — a huge reservoir of experience in this beautiful town in the middle of the country.