I've decided to try and take a slightly different tack here. I'll do a bit of a bio in the text and then look through the "standard questions" and answer those as posts below.

I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania. I've always had a bit of an interest in science, and around 6^th grade, I took boys' fascination with explosions to a natural conclusion, and became really interested in nuclear explosions. I started trying to teach myself everything I could on particle physics from popular science sources and encyclopedias.

I got a B.S. in Physics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I studied abroad for a semester in Tokyo and a semester in Australia. I had a wonderful professor there who introduced a General Relativity course for us. I found that I loved GR. It was intensely interesting. But there wasn't any research available at the school in GR, so I ended up doing my undergrad research in Quantum Computation. (Dense coding in mixed-state channels of different dimensions). So this may explain a bit of why I do a lot of discussion here about GR and Quantum Computers/Entanglement (though I'm far from an expert on the latter).

I now am working on my PhD in Physics at Iowa State University. My focus is "Experimental Nuclear Physics." I work with [RHIC](www.bnl.gov/rhic) at BNL. Right now I'm working on heavy-flavour tagging of jets. The beauty of the work at the moment is that it's pretty agnostic between the two main focii of RHIC's physics goals; ie, I can use it to analyze the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) or to analyze Proton structure.

Edit 1: link to last week's AMA with blueboybob. We're trying to help everyone "get to know" the panelists a little bit, so you can understand our training and backgrounds when we answer questions.

Edit 2: I'm also on Midnight - 8AM shift this week, so if you're not in the US and you're tired of always being ignored when a lot of us are asleep, I may be able to field some questions too tonight! So long as not too much is broken with our detector.

Edit 3: I've created our AMA aggregation reddit at r/AskScienceAMA