Michelle Espy

What’s in that bottle? Imaging liquids at airports
 

My decision in high school to become a physicist was, a first, based on sheer orneriness. No one in my family or inner circle was a scientist, and it appeared to be challenging. No one around me had claimed the niche, or would have a clue what I was up to! But in college it was clear that it was really hard, and the only reason one would stick with it was because it intrigued. Really, to me there is nothing more amazing than the fact that one could actually predict and understand the natural world at some level. And if appropriately applied, such understanding could actually make the world better. So it went from orneriness to genuine passion. I went off to graduate school and studied nuclear physics. What could be better than understanding how everything was made up of things invisible, forces that you never directly interact with, yet keep you from flying apart? If someone was willing to pay me to learn about it, even better.
 
By the time I reached Los Alamos, I had met the love of my life (my husband, not nuclear physics) and it was time to get a job. I happened to get pointed toward a small group that was working on ultra-sensitive detection of the weak magnetic fields coming from the human brain. It wasn’t nuclear physics, but one couldn’t argue that the problem wasn’t compelling. How do our brains work? How small a magnetic field can we measure and what can we learn? And so I moved from nuclear physics to SQUIDs. The SQUID is the superconducting quantum interference device, arguably the most sensitive detector of magnetic fields that there is. We have built systems and measured from systems ranging from brains to bombs. Recently we have focused on trying to use the tiny magnetic fields (no larger the weak magnetic field of the Earth) to look at what is inside such things, by a process called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
 
More recently I have been called upon to lead the team that I joined as a post-doc some dozen years ago. It has been a hard move to go from being in the lab doing the experiments to being the one that has to raise the money and write the reports. But still, my team is amazing and what we can measure is astounding. I feel pretty lucky to get to see where we can go next with this incredible technology.