Physicists across the globe are on a quest for a particle that makes up nearly 85 percent of all matter in the universe, yet no one has ever directly detected it. Jessica Fry, a fifth-year physics PhD candidate in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), is one such hunter. Fry grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, not far from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She began dancing at age 3 and by elementary school was competing nationally. On her office desk sits a photograph of her on stage from one of those early recitals, dressed in a ham costume, arms flung wide open ' a reminder, she says, that she doesn't 'half-ass' anything. That includes her fascination with the sciences: when her high school physics teacher handed her a pair of defunct detectors from SLAC and told her to do something with them, she scrounged up a paper from the 1960s using similar equipment, replicated the experiment, and wrote up the project. During her sophomore year, a talent agent she had met...
learn more
