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I am a staff physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), currently serving as Project Manager for PHOBOS, one of the four experiments studying particle interactions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). I have been at BNL for the last 5 years, except for the 2002-2003 academic year, which I spent on a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
At RHIC, we study collisions of nuclei in an attempt to create a super-hot and super-dense state of matter that has not been accessible in any quantity since the big bang 13.7 billion years ago. The collisions create thousands of particles, which we study with a set of sophisticated detectors...but more on this later!
 I was born in Chicago on November 21, 1969. I attended the Francis Parker School in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, but here's where I admit that, despite some early interest and aptitude in science and math, I never took physics in high school! Instead I spent a lot of time reading, taking photographs, and playing and talking about music (all of which I continue to do to this day).
After graduating, I went to Yale University, where I eventually earned a BA in Political Science (after various other choices including philosophy and literature). I became very interested in physics sometime in my junior year, completed a large fraction of the major in my senior year, and then spent an extra year at Yale catching up after graduation working for a physics professor and applying to graduate school in physics.
After making the decision to follow a career in nuclear physics, I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to start a PhD at MIT. A series of events led to the cancellation of my original thesis project at Brookhaven, so I ended up moving to Geneva, Switzerland (living in the nearby French countryside), to work on a silicon detector for the WA98 experiment at CERN and search for Disoriented Chiral Condensates in high-energy collisions of lead nuclei.
After my PhD I moved to New York City to take a postdoctoral position at Columbia University, working on the PHENIX experiment at RHIC, an experiment with 500 scientists. After several years, I wanted to experience science at a smaller scale again, so I joined the staff at Brookhaven to help set up the PHOBOS experiment, which is run by a much smaller team of 50 scientists. This is where I continue to work today.
 2005 promises to be an interesting year. The RHIC program has been incredibly successful in the last four years, with a wide array of results from proton-proton, deuteron-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions. And yet, after a recent period of soul-searching, resulting in the four RHIC experiments writing a set of "white papers" summarizing our results and trying to make some sense of them, the field is right now trying to determine its most important questions for the future, and where to answer them. It's harder than it looks -- and I hope to show why in future entries to this Quantum Diary.
Please visit my home page at Brookhaven.
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