Dirk Aarts

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Being surprised about everyday phenomena.

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Nick Achilleos

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:One of my undergraduate lecturers in physics was a stellar astronomer, and his excellent teaching and discussions made me aware that astrophysics was not just an interesting hobby, but also a potentially very interesting job. The reason I ended up studying physics was largely due to my own interest in mathematics and physics and, again, being fortunate enough to have good teachers in these areas while at school.

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Abhay Ashtekar

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I read George Gamow's books in school and was fascinated by cosmology, general relativity and quantum physics.

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Yosi Avron

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:A good teacher in high school and a class with bright and ambitious students. Being the son of a (haute couture) tailor, I chose areas of research where the physics and the math are elegant.

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Almut Beige

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Somehow, I always knew that I wanted to work in science. What I could not decide for a long time was whether to study computer science, mathematics or physics. Somehow I felt most comfortable among physicists. Later as a student, I was very impressed by one of our Professors, especially by his enthusiasm for his work. He got me interested in quantum optics and in doing a PhD with him. I was then lucky that quantum optics is of such a great relevance for the practical implementation of quantum computing. So finally, I get to work on computer science and mathematics too.

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Francesco Cataliotti

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I have to give credit to my high school teacher for luring me into physics. Once I started university courses I immediately got caught and carried away. I chose atomic physics after a brief experience with particle physics mainly because of the size of the experimental groups. In my view atomic physics is still a field where one single researcher has the opportunity to do everything (or almost everything) on his own; from the theoretical model to the experiment design, to the realization of special experimental tools.

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Charles Dermer

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:The realization that adopting the scientific worldview could immediately solve many intractable problems in religion, in particular, omniscience and suffering. And looking at the stars, one of the few legal late night activities where I grew up.

The specific area of research I finally chose was a result of chance: the thesis advisor under whom I had hoped to work already had all the graduate students he could support, so I worked with a professor who had funds to support a graduate student.

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Antonio Ereditato

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:When I was a young boy I already liked science very much. However, at that time I did not really know which field I liked the most. My choice for particle physics came only during the last year of high school.

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Jeffrey Fox

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:My math and science teachers in high school and then in college were excellent, particularly my physics teachers. They got me excited about science. I became interested in biology in college, and began studying mathematical models of biological systems at Ohio State with Dr Ciriyam Jayaprakash (Physics) and Dr Leon Wang (Electrical Engineering).

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Nicolas Gisin

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Science has never been a question for me. I chose my area of research because I wanted to do something that is at the same time fundamental and one a human scale.

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Peter Hommelhoff

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I had worked at the particle collider DESY, and although I still admire the fundamental problems that are being tackled in high energy physics it was a talk in Zürich by T W Hänsch in 1998 that finally pulled me into quantum optics. The questions answered in this field are of fundamental importance too, with the big difference that it usually just needs a couple of people and an optical table to run an experiment. I was led into science by curiosity (and so far have not managed to escape).

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Gary Horowitz

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:My father was a physicist and worked for NASA. He was involved in the first measurements of the upper atmosphere. He shared his interest in science with me. In college, I was interested in math, physics and astrophysics, and I found that working in general relativity and string theory combined all three.

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Henry Huang

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I can still recall the excitement after solving challenging problems in maths and science during grade school years. I'd like to thank all my teachers, from kindergarten to graduate school, for their guidance into this exciting area of scientific research.

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Dieter Jaksch

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I studied physics because I wanted to understand the laws of nature which form the foundation of future scientific developments and technological applications. Cold atom physics is an area of research where microscopic theoretical models accurately describe experimental setups and can be used to propose novel applications. This is fascinating and has mainly motivated me to work in this area of research.

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Ado Jorio

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:What led me into science was music. Transferring from music to optics was natural and led me to the study of materials science.

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Richard Foa Katz

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:My grandfather, Professor Piero Foa, sparked my interest in science. He was an endocrinologist and a physician among a generation of Jewish scientists to arrive from Europe on the eve of World War II. In the 1980s, when I was a young boy, he was my first science teacher. We dissected frogs and performed simple chemistry experiments in an improvised laboratory in the basement of his house. My interest in geophysics stems from experiences with him, building model volcanoes on the beach and taking hikes in the mountains. Although he is now deceased, I am frequently conscious of his influence and of the many things that he taught me.

I got involved with the research described in the NJP paper when I was an undergraduate student at Cornell University. I was taking an introductory course on the physics of waves and the professor (Bodenschatz) mentioned the experimental setup. He helped me to get funding to do a summer project.

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Steve Kevan

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:As is often the case, my interest in science dates from a very young age. This early interest was maintained through the difficult process of growing up by very good teachers and a few summer enrichment experiences. My early career-oriented interest was more in chemistry than in physics, and all of my degrees are in physical chemistry. I became interested in physics late in college, and since that time have focused on issues that lie at the boundary of chemistry and surface and thin film physics.

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Lawrence M Krauss

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:A combination of things: (1) My mother wanted me to be a doctor and she made the mistake of telling me that doctors were scientists. (2) I read popular books by famous scientists like Einstein and Gamow, and I got fascinated by fundamental physics and cosmology.

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Mounir Laroussi

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I have always enjoyed science (since high school). I particularly enjoyed physics and physics experiments. While in graduate school I took a class taught by plasma physicist Professor Igor Alexeff (The University of Tennessee). That class introduced me to plasma physics, which I thought was a fascinating field. I have been hooked since then.

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Julien Laurat

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:My parents were not at all in science. My father was initially a philosophy teacher and my mother an English teacher. However, my interest in science began with astronomy after, surprisingly, a mathematics teacher gave a nice insight during his lecture. When I was around 10 years old, my parents offered me my first telescope and I spent summer nights stargazing and taking long-exposure pictures. At the same time, my brother, 11 years older than me, began a PhD in solid state physics, which raised a lot of interest for me. I finally chose to specialize also in physics and went to an engineering school in Optics (Institut d'Optique - Graduate School, Orsay, France) where I met interesting teachers involved in fundamental optics and atom-optics research. During the course of this school, I had the great opportunity to spend a summer in China, at the Shanxi University, working experimentally on non-classical states of light in the group of Professor Kunchi Peng and Changde Xie. Then, I carried on my PhD in the quantum optics group of Professor Claude Fabre in Paris, developing Optical Parametric Oscillators for generation of entangled beams. After graduation, and a one-year position with Professor Grangier, I moved to California with a European Marie Curie fellowship and joined Professor H J Kimble at Caltech to work on light-atom interfacing.

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Ulf Leonhardt

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:When I was six or seven my grandfather Max used to take me on long walks through the countryside. He was the village teacher; he loved to explain everything we saw and I loved to listen. However, being a teacher, he examined me afterwards. I did not like exams (I still don't like them), so I usually refused to answer, but of course I remembered what he said. These walks with explanations, despite the exams, got me interested in the natural world and eventually in physics.

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Noboru Miura

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Magnetic fields and magnetism are full of mysterious charm. Extreme conditions of physical parameters often bring about new phenomena and new discoveries. This has been proven in the case of ultra-low temperature and ultra-high pressure. For researchers who were interested in magnetism, it was a natural dream to explore the world of extremely high magnetic fields.

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Gregor Morfill

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I was 'exported' from Germany to England at age 16. Physics in Germany was my worst subject (together with Latin), but in England it was one of the few that was easier for me to understand in English. After some time I even began to like physics.

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Bill Munro

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I think I have always been a scientist since my youngest days. I always wanted to know how and why things worked and pursuing a science career was a natural step. I started off my career as a chemist but gradually moved into quantum optics and quantum information processing. Quantum information processing is an interdisciplinary subject which is teaching us a lot about physics, information, and what that means.

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Yoshikazu Nakayama

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I read the first paper of carbon nanotubes written by Iijima one year later after it was published. I learned from this paper and other papers that this material has a beautiful structure and also unique mechanical and electronic properties. The motivationthat led me into this field is the following. The material is tiny and has a variety of structures so that the barriers to establish its manipulation process and also its synthesis process in order to prepare an aimed structure are very high. Therefore, I thought it takes a long time to use this material for practical devices and scientists working for manufacturers cannot join this field for a while.

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Martin Plenio

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Originally I wanted to be a mathematician as I enjoyed it more at school, but during my undergraduate years I realized that the sort of mathematics that I like is the one done by theoretical physicists. I chose quantum mechanics and more specifically quantum optics because I greatly enjoyed the undergraduate courses that I took in Göttingen in those two areas. In my PhD in Göttingen I worked on the properties of laser irradiated single ions in ion traps. When I moved to Imperial College as a Feodor-Lynen fellow of the Humboldt Foundation in 1995, I became interested in the problem of decoherence of ion trap quantum computers. My background was just right for that sort of problem and it was this work that really started me off in quantum information.

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Mark Raizen

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I have been interested in science since I was a child. I originally wanted to be a medical doctor and researcher, following in the footsteps of my grandfather and uncle. The route to my present field took unusual paths, starting in mathematics to theoretical particle physics and then to experimental table-top physics.

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Wolfgang Schleich

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:When I was in high school my favorite topic was music. I played violin and viola, conducted the orchestra and composed music. I wanted to become a musician. Unfortunately, the job opportunities in this field are rather limited and my parents were kind enough to push me away from this career. The only other interest I had in high school was mathematics. So I decided to become a high school teacher in mathematics and physics since this occupation would still leave me enough time to pursue my interests in music.

With this attitude I studied for three semesters at the University of Munich without putting much effort into it. I finally met Professor Georg Süßmann who taught theoretical physics in Munich. His class on theoretical mechanics showed me for the first time that theoretical physics is a wonderful topic where a wholesale of facts is deduced from very few principles.

The class with Professor Süßmann was the first turning point in my studies. The second one arose when I chose the field of quantum optics which was due to the late Professor Herbert Walther. At that time he was building up the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and introduced me to Professor Marlan O Scully; I was very fortunate to have him as my Diploma and PhD supervisor in the field of theoretical quantum optics.

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Kate Scholberg

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I've wanted to be a scientist since I was a little kid; as a first-grader I loved star-gazing and memorized the names of the planets. I went through a biology phase in elementary school, then discovered physical science in high school. At first I wanted to be a chemist, then realized it was physics I really loved. My undergrad degree was in physics; in grad school I worked on an underground experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy called MACRO, whose primary aim was a search for magnetic monopoles (we didn't find any, but set stringent limits). The detector was also sensitive to the burst of neutrinos from a core collapse supernova, and this topic ended up being my thesis project. Since then I've been working primarily in neutrino physics.

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Mark Trodden

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I was always good at science and mathematics, and ended up studying math as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. I found myself drawn to applied mathematics, and eventually to theoretical physics, as ways to connect abstract mathematics with reality. As with many people, I loved both quantum mechanics and general relativity, and particle cosmology was an area in which I would not be forced to choose between them. I was fortunate enough to find talented and caring mentors early enough to make this choice feel right and work out for me.

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