Since he arrived on campus, Daniel, who is studying both chemical physics and math, has come to realize how true Professor Miller’s description was.
“For students here, the academic freedom is liberating, because it allows them to explore the things they’re truly passionate about,” he says. “Talk to anyone and you will find something they're passionate about, which makes for interesting and intriguing conversations. The same is true about the faculty.”
It’s hard to imagine now, but Daniel had not done research before coming to Brown. He was surprised how accessible research was to undergraduates, and once he stepped into the lab, he didn’t want to leave.
“Before I came to Brown, I had this vague idea that I wanted to try doing research. I've always been someone who was very curious about everything around me, whether it be the physical world or the people who inhabit it, and research sounded appealing because you study things that are still open questions in the hopes of understanding more and adding to an existing body of knowledge.”
During his time at Brown, Daniel has done research in a variety of labs on a range of topics. He examined dark-matter interactions in galaxy clusters using weak gravitational lensing, and took part in a project exploiting symmetry to mitigate the sign problem in quantum Monte Carlo simulations, which are computational methods whose common aim is the study of complex quantum systems.