In this interview, David Zierler interviews Deborah Harris, professor of physics at York University and Senior Scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Harris discusses her work as co-spokesperson for MINERvA, and she recounts her childhood and her father’s work as a physicist at Fermilab. She describes her undergraduate work at Cornell before she transferred to Berkeley. Harris discusses her graduate work at Chicago, where she contributed to the E799 experiment, and her thesis research on Kaon decay modes. She describes her postdoctoral research at the University of Rochester in neutrino physics, and her full time transition as a staff scientist at Fermilab to focus on neutrino oscillations. Harris discusses her subsequent work on MINERvA and MINOS and how the neutrino community has grown over the past fifteen years. She describes her contributions to the DUNE collaboration and its goal of taking neutrino measurements over a broad range of energy. At the end of the interview, Harris explains her decision to take a faculty appointment at York, and how neutrino research contributes to broader questions in physics.
