The Coughlin Brothers

Michael: "I was originally going to follow my mother and become a doctor until I did an internship at the Minneapolis Heart Institute. I saw and smelled open heart surgery for the first time. I nearly passed out then and there! It was horrifying. From that year onwards I've been involved in LIGO."

Scott: "My brother Michael is the only reason I am in science at all. It goes all the way back to high school when our helicopter parents decided that if you didn't have a summer high school project experience then you were doomed to fail in life. So, through the greatest act of nepotism of all time, they had Michael set me up with a summer LIGO project. Little did I know, that was the foot in the door that would cause me to end up here."

Michael Coughlin (right) is a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. During working hours, he performs unmodeled searches for gravitational waves and studies sources of detector noise like earthquakes, but he moonlights as a competitive ballroom dancer. Scott Coughlin (left) is a Cardiff University PhD student based at Northwestern University. He runs the Gravity Spy project, which uses machine learning and citizen science to classify glitches in detector data. Scott's main obsession outside of science is football -- he's a huge Minnesota Vikings fan.