Dan D'Orazio
April 24, 1987
Juniata College - Undergraduate

I was born somewhere in Lebanon, Pennsylvania sometime in the 1980's, I have a twin sister (we are not identical) with whom I grew up and spent the first 18 years of my life. We grew up in the small borough of Orangeville (near Bloomsburg University) where my parents still live and where the light pollution wasn't bad enough yet to block out the awe of the night sky. If I could trace back to anything that would be responsible for my interest in science it would have to be nights looking at the stars and asking my dad why they were there. By the time high schol came around I was still set on becoming a scientist but I didnt know what kind, I could never find an area of science that fit with what I wanted to understand (everything) until I read a book in the 10th grade called "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene. What stuck with me in Greene's book lay less in the notion of vibrating strands of energy and multiple curled up dimensions, but in the veiw of physics as the ultimate science in search of reality. I guess that I had always known that I wanted to be a physicist, but until that point I had not known what a physicist was.

In high scool I did more than read books, I was a wrestler, a golfer, and a pole vaulter, I helped to form a science olympiad team and became rather occupied with building balsa wood rubber band powered airplanes and rockets. I won the state championship in the airplane event my senior year and still keep up with the airplane building hobby although I have little time to build these days.

I am now a rising junior at at small liberal arts school (with a not so small physics program) in central Pennsylvania called Juniata College. This previous year I was the president of our SPS chapter. I am currently planning to graduate in two years with a B.S. in Physics and Math (I like math just as much as physics). I plan to go on to graduate school and pursue a PhD in an area of theoretical physics; I have the most interest in cosmology and astrophysics (the big picture in my opinion), but I am playing with the idea of a career in optics as I am working in the laser teaching center this summer at Stony Brook University, It should be an en-light-ening experience. In my free time I play a lot of guitar, listen to and write music, golf etc...

At the moment I am most interested in the area of nonlinear optics (nonlinear mathematics is pretty fun), so I may attempt a project this summer having to do with Optical Phase Conjugation or Acousto Optic Modulators; I guess we'll see. Enjoy