I was born in South Dakota and moved seven times, living in North Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois before graduating high school. Living in a suburb of Chicago for seven years was the longest stretch I lived in one place (until Las Vegas) so I ‘claim’ Chicago as home.

1999. I came to UNLV from a postdoctoral position at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

I liked the idea of working at an up and coming university that had growing research activity. In particular, former UNLV professor Malcolm Nicol had started the High Pressure Science and Engineering Center (HiPSEC) the year before I came to UNLV. This was a unique opportunity for me to be at the ground floor of a promising research center (I was the first external hire to join HiPSEC after it was created). HiPSEC has brought nearly $44 million dollars to UNLV since its inception, and I have been very fortunate to part of its success.

I received a double B.S. in physics and mathematics from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. My Ph.D. is in experimental physics from Washington University, St. Louis.

From an early age, I was fascinated with mathematics and the ways you could use it to design and understand the world. Before high school, I wanted to be an architect and design buildings with this skill. However, when I took chemistry and physics in high school, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in science. The ability to understand the workings of the world held (and still holds) my fascination. Also, the more I learned, the more I became enthralled by how much we still didn’t know. In the end physics won out over chemistry because I received a full scholarship to attend Drake University to study physics by winning a high school competition called the Drake Physics Prize, beating some 3,267 students from 27 high schools in Iowa, Minnesota, and North and South Dakota.

I study the property of materials at high pressure. By applying pressure to materials, the atoms are forced to move. This movement causes a change in the physical properties of the materials. Linking the interplay between structure and physical properties is at the heart of understanding new materials. The importance of the high-pressure research is seen across multiple scientific agencies. The Materials Genome Initiative is an “effort to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost.” Using pressure to direct the synthesis efforts for new materials has a long and successful history. The utility of using pressure can be clearly seen in a Department of Energy report entitled Basic Research Needs for Materials under Extreme Environments that stresses the importance of extreme conditions (like pressure) to “An ultimate goal in materials science is to develop control strategies for synthesis in which the precise details of atomistic arrangements can be essentially programmed with any arbitrary level of complexity and hierarchy of length scales.”

The idea that physicists “know everything.” Students learn to solve well-defined problems with well-known solutions. However, physics research is quite different as we explore open-ended problems without known solutions. As I tell students working on research in my laboratory, “You won’t find the answers to your problems in the back of a textbook.”

For a student thinking of a career in science I recommend finding a research experience. I went to a small university in the Midwest and didn’t have a ‘real’ research experience until a summer program at Ames National Laboratory in Iowa that really opened my eyes about research. It was then that I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Unlike where I did my undergraduate work, undergraduate students can get this research experience at UNLV during the school year. Since I came to UNLV, more than 40 undergraduate students have had some degree of hands-on research experience in my laboratory.

I have always been fond of playing games of all types. I still like to watch sports and play card games as much as I can. I still find time to shoot pool, throw darts, and go bowling.