Jax Sanders

"Dungeons and Dragons is one of the nerdiest things I've done. I've been playing it since I was about 13. It's one of the things in my life I've been doing longer than working on LIGO. I normally play, and my partner is the Dungeon Master. We met playing DND together. It's fun. It's collaborative story telling. A lot of it is 'go fight something', but that's just giving a framework to build a story around, and it's been really useful for learning how to react to things on the fly and how to improvise. It's something I do with my friends on the weekends, but it's also something that is a good life skill, weirdly enough. I'm usually more of a rogue-ish type, but I'm playing a paladin now. I actually have a code of honor I have to follow, which is a bit weird for me. I'm used to being the bad boy of the group."

Jax Sanders is an Assistant Professor at Marquette University who works on conceptual design for future gravitational-wave detectors and on interferometer optics. Beyond science and DND, Jax likes to go outside to enjoy Lake Michigan and loves making comics and art. They recently took a watercolor painting class and found it difficult to let the watercolors move freely given that they are a control freak in their job working on control systems. You can follow Jax on Twitter at @JaxYellsAtLaser.