Orion Sauter

  "I've wanted to be a scientist for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching Bill Nye the Science Guy, and I dreamt of one day having a job where I needed a lab coat. I achieved that dream in college, where I worked in a lab during the summers. We studied quantum dots, and cleaned our microscope slides with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid, in a procedure dubbed the "Piranha Bath". The chemicals boil on mixing, so we would wear a lab coat, nitrile gloves, special acid gloves over those, goggles, and a face shield. During my final year of college, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. The amount of human knowledge that was used in my treatment was incredible, including endoscopic surgery, chemotherapy that included a drug refined from mustard gas, and finishing with proton radiation treatment. I was lucky enough to be treated at Massachusetts General Hospital, which uses Harvard's cyclotron in proton therapy. As a physicist it was an amazing (and terrifying) experience to have particles fired into my brain at 0.6c, producing effects like the smell of ionized air in my sinuses, and static fuzz over my vision from Cherenkov radiation in my optic nerve."

Orion Sauter is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Florida. He works on detector simulation, previously having contributed to data analysis for continuous wave and compact binary searches. He aspires to teach physics as a professor at a college or university, and is already asked many questions from his niece and nephews, who know him as 'Uncle Orion the Scientist'. His dog, Eros, is primarily motivated by being pet. Orion keeps a blog at fundamentalforces.blogspot.com where he looks at things he's curious about through the lens of physics.