Katherine Avanesov

Hi, I’m Katherine Avanesov and I am currently a rising senior at Caltech. As a freshman, I was set on becoming a theoretical physicist, but through a rather nomadic research journey that’s taken me all the way from analyzing particle tracks at CERN, to modelling risk on Wall Street, I’ve come to learn that the problems I enjoy working on the most are that combine theory with experiment. I thrive on projects where I can work across that full span – from conceptualising an abstract framework, to actually translating and implementing and testing it in practice. This self-discovery is how I came to presently be double-major in Physics and Computer Science, and why I now feel just as comfortable deriving the Hydrogen atom’s fine structure with group theory, as I am at the whiteboard planning out the back-end of a spreadhseet engine!

A lot of the time, the resposibilities of theory and experiment are divided up amongst diferrent individuals or even research departments, but I am on a mission to seek out problems and research settings which naturally straddle this boundary and allow me to make the fullest use of both my mathematical and engineering skills.