There are a few things that first drew me to physics, starting back in high school. I found high school physics (circuits, levers etc.) incredibly dull, but I’m from a family of mathematicians and that always kept me interested. I remember learning about complex numbers with my dad when I was about 12, and how beautiful and awe inspiring the abstraction was. I also had a fantastic high school maths teacher (Mrs Derringer) who taught me the joy of curiosity in maths: there’s nothing more satisfying than solving a good hard integral!

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Next came a love of chemistry. In high school chemistry, things were really interesting. The structure of the periodic table is built on symmetry. I was studying for the chemistry olympiad, and I asked my teacher (another great one, Mr Cowan) where the periodic table came from. He wrote down Schrodinger’s equation on the black board and said “that’s all I remember: you’ll have to do a physics degree to go further”. And so I did, and I was hooked.

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Fast forward to PhD time. I’ve tried experiments, and found I’m not hands on, and now I’m a full-time theorist. Many of us in academia were probably used to life at the top of the tree in our studies, right up until we hit our PhD’s (and maybe some still do feel that way). I got a first rude awakening at “prospects in theoretical physics” at Princeton. I was sat in a lecture by Juan Maldacena, with Edward Witten taking notes beside me, and some students seemed right at home, while I was feeling a bit in over my head.

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I got to the end of my PhD, I passed, and I think it was okay. But looking back at what I’ve achieved since (and particularly during my time at PI) bringing my study of dark matter in cosmology to a real synthesis, I know I could have done better.

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When I left Perimeter Institute, on my last day, I said this to a senior colleague while sat in the bistro: “I think you guys took a chance on me. My work in my application was okay, but I was still finding my feet”. My colleague replied: “we didn’t take a chance on you. We knew you had that potential, and your previous work was innovative and showed that.” Hearing that was a brilliant confidence boost for me, and typified the kind of support and encouragement young postdocs like me got at PI. At PI I achieved what I set out to achieve in my research, but that doesn’t mean I have to look back on my older work as in any way sub-par. It’s all part of the process of science.

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I’m still finding my feet in my research, like we all are, all the time. I’m broadening to new things, and finding new types of synthesis across the ways we think about different models of dark matter in cosmology. And thanks to supportive comments from colleagues I now move forward with a bit more confidence.