Andalucía → Denver
My family emigrated from Andalucía, in southern Spain, in 1990 — my parents and my three older siblings, a brother and two sisters. They settled first in Madison, Wisconsin, where my mother and father both earned PhDs in microbiology, somehow raising four children while they did it. I arrived a week after my mother defended her thesis.
We moved to Denver for their postdocs and stayed when my father took a faculty position at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. All of that happened before I could form memories; mine begin a little later, once he had a lab of his own.
Castellano
Our home ran in castellano — Spanish was my first language, and I didn't really learn English until kindergarten. That part of us never faded. We still keep a Spanish table — tortilla de patatas, croquetas, boquerones, squid, paella, pisto — we watch fútbol, and we sing villancicos every Christmas.
Most of my childhood summers were spent in Granada with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and I still get back to Spain as often as I can to keep those ties close.
A childhood in the lab
That lab is where a good part of my childhood happened. I ran small experiments of my own — culturing bacteria, making slides — and spent hours watching my parents write papers, sitting in on my father's medical-school lectures, tagging along to the weekly lab meeting. Science was never a subject I discovered; it was simply the family trade, and the lab was a second home.
Outdoors
Outside of it, I played soccer — my father coached the team, the Raptors — and most of our time together as a family was spent outdoors. We backpacked, fished, and watched birds, noticing which wild berries and grains they fed on and pulling apart owl pellets to reconstruct what the owls had eaten. That habit of looking closely at small living things never left me. It's where my love of aquariums comes from: I keep planted freshwater tanks, aquascaping in the tradition of the late Takashi Amano.
Art, music, and books
Time with my mother was art, music, and literature. I played piano for ten years, until a robotics accident in high school severed the tendons in my right hand; regaining full movement took two years, and by then I was too deep in physics to go back to practicing. The affection stayed — I'm still pulled toward the Impressionists, toward Ravel and Debussy and Chopin, toward Monet and Picasso and Rodin — and I still oil paint.
She also handed me the books that shaped how I think: Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Joyce, and later the philosophers — Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant. I've always been drawn to work that's cerebrally vivid, that asks you to sit with it.
The épée
From eight to sixteen I fenced épée, seriously. I won a national title in my age group, took several North American Cups, and represented the United States at the Junior Olympics. Then my competitors hit their growth spurts and I didn't — and in épée, where the blade is a fixed length, a long reach is a permanent advantage. My edge quietly slipped away.
It happened to coincide with my falling for engineering, math, and physics, so I took an honest look at the two roads and chose the one that seemed more interesting for the long haul.
The turn to physics
Much of that pull came from how much I loved to build. My high-school experimental-physics class was really a run of engineering projects — circuits, roller coasters, catapults — teaching electricity and elastic forces by making things. In parallel I was reading special relativity on my own, and the notion that space and time themselves are elastic struck me as one of the most beautiful ideas I'd ever met. Between the joy of building and the quiet of fundamental things, physics won. I went to CU Boulder to study it.
The rest — physics at Boulder, cooling molecules with lasers at Columbia, and the turn toward building companies and machines — is still being written here.