Hard Science: Stories about journeys into physics
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2017
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part 1: When Sarah Demers gets a work-study job working on a particle detector, she has no idea what she's in for. Part 2: After being discouraged from pursuing science, Katy Rodriguez Wimberly searches for her place in the military and as an actor. Sarah Demers is the Horace D. Taft Associate Professor of Physics at Yale University. She is a particle physicist and a member of the ATLAS and Mu2e Collaborations, studying fundamental particles and the forces with which they interact. Sarah graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in physics in 1999. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester as a member of the CDF Collaboration in 2005. She was a postdoc with Stanford's Linear Accelerator Center, based at CERN as a member of the ATLAS experiment before beginning her faculty position at Yale in 2009. She has been recognized for her research with an Early Career Award from the Department of Energy and has won awards for teaching and service at Yale. When she isn't doing physics she can be found spending time with her husband and two kids exploring in the woods behind their house, baking, reading and, recently, shoveling snow. M. Katy Rodriguez Wimberly is a first year graduate student at University of California, Irvine (UCI) in their Physics Department. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and the first Junior Board Fellow of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. She earned her Bachelor’s of Science degree, with a math minor, from California State University, Long Beach in May 2015. At UCI she is working with Dr. Michael Cooper on galaxy evolution research, which studies the coming together of satellite galaxies onto massive clusters of galaxies by comparing large cosmological simulations to observational data. Katy’s research interests lie in galaxy evolution and observational cosmology. Additionally, she loves and conducts astronomy outreach with underrepresented minorities, focusing primarily on K-12 Special Needs students (including children on the Autism Spectrum and those with Down’s Syndrome).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.8 | Is NYU a scientist the... |
| 0:06.6 | I felt... |
| 0:07.4 | I felt... |
| 0:07.6 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:09.6 | I figured it out. |
| 0:10.6 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.8 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:25.5 | Hi, everyone, I'm Ben Lully, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. This week, we're bringing you two stories from the hard sciences. |
| 0:31.0 | Our first story this week is from Sarah Demers. It was recorded in February 2017 in Luce Hall |
| 0:36.0 | on the Yale University campus at an event we produced |
| 0:38.9 | in partnership with Yale Women in Science, as well as the Yale Provost Office and Center for |
| 0:43.5 | Teaching and Learning. |
| 0:48.9 | So I became a particle physicist because I needed a job. I was a work study student and had to work |
| 0:55.6 | 10 hours a week and I needed to pay tuition, piece of my tuition, pay for books, phone bills. |
| 1:03.4 | In those days, back in those days, for four college students, we had one phone, was plugged |
| 1:08.2 | into the wall and you had to hover over it if you wanted to talk into it. |
| 1:12.2 | They made us pay for this indignity. |
| 1:14.4 | There were a number of things that I had to pay for, so I needed a job. |
| 1:17.4 | And when I started out in school, I went to work at the library. |
| 1:20.8 | They're always hiring at the library. |
... |
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