Dr. Petra Merkel (she/her): Season 2 Episode 3

<p>Season 2 Episode 3 &nbsp;</p> <p><br></p> <p>I am an experimental collider physicist, who specializes on detector instrumentation, and I also love traveling, reading, movies, jigsaw puzzles, listening to live music and learning to play the piano. In the past I have been involved in the Higgs boson discovery, but now I specialize on designing and building silicon trackers and on &nbsp;coordinating generic detector R&amp;D for the High Energy Physics community. I love my research, because it requires a lot of creativity, allows me &nbsp;to learn something new every day, and leads me to work with a very diverse group of people, who are all extremely good at what they are doing. Snowmass turned out to be a lot of work at a very challenging time during the pandemic, but I feel it is important to help define and shape &nbsp;the future of our field using my expertise in detector instrumentation. &nbsp;</p> <p><br></p> <p>My Journey as a Physicist is brought to you by PhD student <a href="https://perl.natsci.msu.edu/people/graduate-students/bryan-stanley/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bryan Stanley</a> (he/him/his) and Prof. <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.pa.msu.edu%2Fpeople%2Fhwlin%2F&amp;sa=D&amp;sntz=1&amp;usg=AFQjCNHKpswHb14HhBLArZNZxdgSumIxoA" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Huey-Wen Lin</a> (she/her). Season 2 is edited by Varalee Sakorikar. &nbsp;</p> <p>Season 2 consists of members of the Particle Physics Community Planning Exercise known as Snowmass. &nbsp;</p> <p>If you like the podcast or have any suggestions for future improvement, please take a minute to use <a href="https://forms.gle/YBdVtiKAdKzHZHVi9" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">this form</a> to let us know: &nbsp;https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScxRDWXM-iJ_IdVAh7ZtrnqjVpajodVMdmA3o3piLAO3u-Jxw/viewform</p>