Yale University, United States
I was lucky. I realized my childhood dream. I said I wanted to be a scientist, and I never changed my mind. I was always a curious child, and when I was 5 or 6 my grandfather bought me a microscope, and voila. I’ve been lucky enough to work in many different collaborations and visit most of the important labs. For DUNE I am responsible for the factory at Yale where we will be creating the anode plane assemblies, very important components of the detector. When I was around 21, I discovered volleyball and fell in love with it. I learned pretty fast, and became a coach at the national level in Italy. I think volleyball is a pretty scientific sport. It’s all about geometry and statistics. You cannot know what the ball will do, but still you can study and make some statistical analysis. Volleyball is not like football, where one player can dominate it. In volleyball, a team has to be a team, and there is a lot of strategy. It’s just like being a part of a physics collaboration.