In this interview, Jo Dunkley, professor of physics and astrophysical sciences at Princeton, discusses her life and career. Dunkley describes the nature of this dual appointment and she recounts her childhood in London and her all-girls school education. She describes her undergraduate experience at Cambridge and the formative influence of Malcolm Longair’s class on relativity. Dunkley explains that pursuing a graduate degree in physics was not a foregone conclusion, and that she initially considered a career in international development. She discusses her motivation to study under the direction Pedro Ferreira at Oxford to work on the cosmic microwave background experiments. Dunkley conveys the immediate importance of Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) on her thesis research and the opportunities that led to her postdoctoral work at Princeton to work with David Spergel and Lyman Page on WMAP. She explains her decision to return to the Oxford faculty to continue working with Ferreira and the origins of her involvement in the Atacama Cosmology Telescope project and subsequently the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST, now the Vera C. Rubin Observatory) endeavor and her work on it with Ian Shipsey. Dunkley discusses the challenges in maintaining a work-life balance during maternity leaves at Oxford and then at Princeton, after she joined the faculty in 2016. She describes the many exciting projects her graduate students are working on and she explains her current interests in understanding the Hubble constant. At the end of the interview, Dunkley surveys the major unanswered questions in contemporary cosmology, the viability of discovering the mass of neutrinos, and what the interplay between theory and experimentation might hold for the future.
