A physicist's life: write a little code, mush a few Huskies

Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

A physicist's life: write a little code, mush a few Huskies

First the noses start twitching; then all five sets of ears perk up. Jen Adelman-McCarthy knows something tantalizing lies ahead.

Turning the corner, there it is: a dog struggling to break free of its owner to join her oncoming team of sled dogs. Her team leans toward the pair, eager to play. But Adelman-McCarthy barks, "On by!" Instantly, five furry necks snap forward. The dogs zoom past as if temptation had vanished.

"The complete look of shock on the person's face is a lot of fun," says Adelman-McCarthy, a particle physicist at Fermilab who relaxes—and sometimes competes—as a musher.

Dog sledding, she says, "is a collaboration like the large, international groups that work on experiments. You have dogs with strong personalities. You have to learn which dogs are capable of leading, which dogs are best to run in the middle, which are the ‘wheel dogs' that aren't always the brightest but they pull the most weight. You learn to put together a team."

Adelman-McCarthy worked for 10 years at Fermilab on the first two phases of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, helping identify 930,000 galaxies across one-quarter of the sky. She debugged and formatted software code that flags objects of interest spotted by the survey's telescopes. Now she will do same as part of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, as well as the Dark Energy Survey using a telescope in Chile.

The physicist borrows Huskies from fellow race enthusiasts to forge a team with her own dog Behr. Rescued from an abusive past, he has worked for five years to overcome a fear of people and become a lead race dog, as well as an enthusiastic participant in events to educate the public about the sport. Dog sledding's best-known event, the Iditarod, a 1000-plus-mile race with a worldwide audience, kicked off March 7 in Alaska.

"Those racers are my heroes," Adelman-McCarthy says. "Behr and I sit on the couch eating junk food, dreaming about being that good."

Tona Kunz