I did my graduate work in experimental particle physics.
Big science, large collaboration, lots of people, cables,
computers, and money, looking at very small things -
quarks, leptons, neutrinos, weak bosons - you get the idea.
I was a member of the DØ collaboration from 1993-2001,
though I worked on the experiment as an undergrad at
Michigan State University from
1988-1991. I went to graduate school at the University of Rochester, graduating
in 1997. For my PhD thesis, I measured the transverse
momentum distribution of the Z boson. As a postdoc at
Michigan State from 1997-2001, I worked primarily on
the Level 2 trigger for Run II.
The center of the particle physics universe has moved
Europe. The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is nearly finished
and will be taking data soon. The big deal there will be
looking for the Higgs Boson and clues to the origin of
mass. What the heck does that mean? Here are a couple of
links:
What is the Higgs Boson?/What is
mass?
How Does a Particle Accelerator
Work?
The Quantum Universe from interactions.org