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I was born in 1967 in Boston, to a physicist father and a mother who is a French teacher. I grew up near Fermilab in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. I started college at Cornell in upstate New York as a chemistry major but after working at Fermilab during winter and summer vacations (and after a particularly tough Organic Chemistry class) I decided to major in physics. I was impressed first of all by how much fun physicists seemed to have while they were on the job, and also I was excited to be building detectors that could see particles that you couldn't even see with a microscope. In the middle of my junior year I got married and transfered to
Berkeley , where my husband Rob was a graduate student.
In 1989 I started graduate school at the University of Chicago. For my thesis I worked on an experiment that searched for very rare decays of the long-lived neutral kaon, the very particle that first proved that nature does not work the same for particles as for antiparticles. I got my PhD in 1994 and started doing research on a Fermilab neutrino experiment, NuTeV. While on NuTeV I focused mainly on getting as precise a calibration as possible on the NuTeV detector, which was crucial for NuTeV's very exciting measurement of the coupling constant for the weak interaction. I became a mother in 1997, which is by far the hardest job I've ever taken. In 1999, during all the flurry of NuTeV's result hitting the press, I got a job at Fermilab working on another neutrino experiment, MINOS. The goal of MINOS is (similarly to NuTeV) to greatly improve the measurement of a fundamental property of neutrinos, but in this case MINOS will look for neutrino oscillations, which will tell precisely the mass difference between two different neutrinos. I became a "mother of two" in 2000, which is just barely easier (to me) than being a mother of one. In 2002 while still on MINOS I started working on the MINERvA experiment, which will study in amazing detail the way neutrinos interact in matter, which ultimately means even better oscillation measurements.
 My kids do a superb job of clearing my mind of physics from the moment I pick them up from the (most excellent) Fermilab day care and grade school until the time I put them to sleep. To keep sane through all this, I play volleyball once or twice a week, read fiction as often as possible, and play folk music (preferably any kind that requires a mandolin). While I don’t mind if my children eventually decide to go into something other than physics, I do hope that the year 2005 is the year that they start playing music with me.
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