Profiles in Science

Douglas Gough

Fellow Adjoint Douglas Gough and Fellow Juri Toomre have known one another since they were both graduate students in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge (UK) in the mid-1960s. At that time, Toomre was studying fluid dynamics and Gough was exploring astrophysics.Read more »

Phil Armitage

Phil Armitage was born in 1971 just outside of London in Sevenoaks, Kent, England. He was keen on astronomy early in life. As an elementary school student, he kept abreast of extensive press coverage of the Voyager I spacecraft’s flight past Jupiter and Saturn during 1979 and 1980. To encourage his passion for astronomy, Armitage’s parents bought him a six-inch reflecting telescope. Read more »

Judah Levine

Judah Levine was born and raised in New York City. Since most of his relatives were rabbis, his mother and her family really wanted him to be a rabbi, too. To prepare for this career, he played around with batteries and light bulbs as well as his erector and chemistry sets. “I discovered I had a natural aptitude for playing around,” Levine recalls.Read more »

Jun Ye

Jun Ye was born in Shanghai, China, in 1967. His father was a naval officer who later pursued a career in business. His mother was an environmental scientist and city official who controlled funding for environmental protection. While his parents were busy with their careers, Ye grew up in Shaoxing, a city about 200 km south of Shanghai. He was raised by his father’s mother, E-Gui Jin, who placed such a high value on education that he would dedicate his Ph.D. Read more »

John Bohn

John Bohn grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, drawn to science by repeated viewings of Star Trek. He kept busy doing experiments in his basement chemistry lab, taking apart old radios, and playing Little League baseball. His fondest memory of Little League was the year he was one of the top batters in his league, an accomplishment he attributes to his team’s pitcher, who was the only one in the league who could throw a curve ball. Read more »

Murray Holland

Murray Holland was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. He wanted to be a scientist for as long as he can remember. Because his father was an electrical engineer, Holland was exposed to technical ideas from early childhood. He developed a special interest in physics when he was about 14 years old because of the influence of some excellent high school teachers. Read more »

J. Mathias Weber

Mathias Weber has known he would become a scientist ever since he was five or six years old and living in Pirmasens, Germany. As a child, he read as much about science as he could. His specific interest in the field of chemistry began when he was about 13 years old. He had convinced his parents to let him set up a chemistry lab in one room in the family home. Read more »

Deborah Jin

Deborah Jin was born in Palo Alto, California, but spent most of her childhood in Indian Harbor Beach, Florida. Her father was a professor of physics at nearby Florida Institute of Technology, and her mother had a Master’s degree in engineering physics. Read more »

Rosalba Perna

From the time she was in elementary school in a small little town in the south of, Italy (Buccino), Rosalba Perna knew she was going to be a scientist. Early on, she was fascinated by the way physics describes nature and stories about exotic phenomena in the Universe. Read more »

Heather Lewandowski

Heather Lewandowski grew up in the small town of Laurium on the upper peninsula of Michigan, which extends into Lake Superior. She earned a B. S. in physics at nearby Michigan Tech in 1997.

That same year, she packed her bags and moved to Boulder to begin her graduate study in physics at the University of Colorado. Read more »