Andrew Adare
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I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the department of physics at Yale University. I live in France and work on the ALICE collaboration at CERN. The ALICE experiment examines nuclear collisions to explore an extreme phase of nuclear matter called 'quark-gluon plasma' that is thought to resemble the universe in its earliest moments.
In 2009 I received my PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder for my work with the PHENIX collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory. There, I honed the everyday skills of our trade: probability and statistics, programming, and communicating in a large collaboration.
I arrived in nuclear physics from an unconventional path, having studied geology and environmental science as an undergraduate near Chicago and subsequently working in oil and gas exploration in the US Gulf Coast. There, my exposure to reservoir seismology techniques piqued an interest in wave mechanics. After switching to academics and dabbling in geophysics, then condensed matter research, I settled in to study how jets of high-momentum particles are modified by the dense nuclear matter created in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
In this initial flood of LHC physics data collection and analysis, life is busy. To regain sanity I escape to the outdoors whenever possible. I consider bikes to be a profound triumph of human ingenuity, and love cycling in many forms: road, mountain, cyclocross, and rolling around town. I'll decline revealing how many bikes I own. Additionally, I love rock climbing, hiking, cooking, improving my French, snowboarding, and spending time with friends. My dreams are to someday become a good teacher, have a garden, and live near the mountains.
