Homer Wolfe
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In early spring of this year, I was asked on short notice to talk to a group of high-school students about my job and life at and Fermilab. I think I'm fairly good at describing the technical stuff in compact ways, but I had only been a post-doc for about four months at that point, so I wasn't really ready for some of the simpler questions like “Do you like your job?”
I do enjoy my work, so I said “yes” immediately, but it was more difficult than I had expected to explain why. There's lots of good things about it, like the flexible hours, travel etc, but that's not really the research itself. Working with big machines, lots of electricity and fast computers also part of it, but those are just the tools. I tried to describe my average day and what the act of research was, but did a pretty poor job of it. So when my colleague Jon Asaadi said he was going to start some blogging, I thought it sounded like a great way to do what I couldn't in that short question-and-answer session.
I got here by starting with a degree in Mathematics and Physics from New College of Florida, and then went to graduate school at UW, Madison. I spent the last three years of my PhD. in Hamburg, Germany working on an experiment called ZEUS at a particle physics lab called DESY. I graduated last November, and took a job with The Ohio State University, operating, maintaining, and doing data analysis on a particle physics experiment at Fermilab called CDF. There's about 500 professors, scientists and students also involved in CDF. Everyone here is really into their work, and science in general, but Jon and I are both outwardly energetic about it, and I'm hoping that the drive and fascination come across in our blogs.
I'm part of the race to observe the Higgs boson, which is one of the most exciting goals here right now. I spend most of my day trying to find improvements to the analyses, to squeeze all the possible power out of the data we have. The rest of the time I work with my piece of the experiment, making sure we take as much data as possible. This is a really exciting time to be in HEP and at Fermilab, working on the next great discovery, and I hope this blog gives others a bit of that excitement.
