This week, we’re presenting two stories from people who made science their one and only..

Part 1: Parmvir Bahia struggles to appease her parents’ desires for an Indian son-in-law while also satisfying her own desires to be a scientist.

Part 2: Monica Dunford’s finds physics cold and boring until she gets a summer job in a lab that changes everything.

Parmvir Bahia is a short, British-Indian, neuroscience  PhD working at the University of South Florida. She studies the role of  nerves in the respiratory system and how they might hold the key to  understanding diseases like asthma and COPD. When not researching or  writing long lists of self-describing adjectives she runs the science  communication and outreach initiatives: taste of science – a science festival for adults, and a podcast called 2Scientists. She also enjoys running on trails and glasses of red wine, but not usually at the same time.

Monica Dunford is an experimental high-energy particle  physicist working on the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at  CERN. She is currently at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Prof.  Dunford’s research ranges from combing through petabytes of data in  search of new elusive particles to crawling in small, dusty places  connecting thousands of kilometers of cables.

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