Intern Katherine Dunne with mentor Maurice Garcia-Sciveres. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab)
As a high school student in Birmingham, Alabama, Berkeley Lab Undergraduate Research (BLUR) intern Katie Dunne first dreamed of becoming a physicist after reading Albert Einstein's biography, but didn't know anyone who worked in science. 'I felt like the people who were good at math and science weren't my friends,' she said. So when it came time for college, she majored in English, and quickly grew dissatisfied because it wasn't challenging enough. Eventually, she got to know a few engineers, but none of them were women, she recalled. She still kept physics in the back of her mind until she read an article about 'The First Lady of Physics,' Chien-Shiung Wu , an experimental physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and later designed the 'Wu experiment,' which proved that the conservation of parity is violated by weak interactions. 'Two male theorists who proposed parity violation won the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics, and Wu did not,' Dunne said. 'When I read about her, I decided that that's what I want to do - design experiments.' So she put physics front and center, and about four years ago, transferred as a physics major to the City College of San Francisco.
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