Mariano Padilla
Childhood Love of Physics Leads Participant to Change Career Paths and Pursue Science
Mariano Padilla, a participant in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (a program which the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education administers for the lab), left his career in information technology to pursue degrees in engineering and physics—his childhood fascination.
High-resolution version of photo (Please give photo credit to the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.)
How fast does light travel? What makes objects fall? How does energy become matter?
These were the types of questions that intrigued Mariano Padilla as a child. And after a 15-year career spent working in information technology, Padilla decided to change professions, return to school and pursue his childhood passion—physics.
“Physics has always intrigued me, but age makes no difference,” Padilla said. “I began my physics trek at age 34, and I look forward to continuing my trek until my goal is completed.”
During the summer of 2007, Padilla was able to put his love for physics to the test at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a participant in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship, which ORISE administers on behalf of ORNL. Assigned to the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) control room, Padilla was tasked with developing an integrated reporting system that would distribute and present information via Web and e-mail—a time-savings—to physicists, control room operators and engineers on the overall health of the hydrogen ion beam accelerator (used to produce neutrons).
“The development of this high-profile system put to use my computer experience, as well as my physics studies,” Padilla said. “My ten-week internship wasn’t enough time to test and debug the system, so my mentor Willem Blokland and I discussed the possibility of me returning to the SNS to finalize it.”
But this isn’t his first time he spent a summer at ORNL; Padilla was a participant in the DOE Community College Institute in 2006, thanks to the director of the Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement program (a California program, where Padilla resides, that enables students to prepare for and graduate with a college degree) who pointed him to the internship opportunity. It was during this summer placement while interning in the physics division that Padilla became most interested in astrophysics, specifically.
“I heard Dr. Michael S. Smith of ORNL speak about the subject in 2006, and his theories on the lithium intrigued me,” Padilla said. “Ever since then I’ve been very interested in the subject—the ‘big bang’ theory and constraint on forces in particular.”
Padilla’s decision to choose a new career path appears to have been the right one for him. DOE recently selected his research paper —the “Development of Emittance Analysis Software for Ion Beam Characterization”—to be published in DOE’s Journal of Undergraduate Science. In addition, Dr. Kathleen Hodge, president of Fullerton College (where he is currently a sophomore), appointed him to represent the college as a delegate to the Orange County Engineering Council.
Padilla, who describes his experience with ORNL as an “amazing” one, hopes to return to ORNL as a participant in the theoretical department of the astrophysics group.
“I want to get a Ph.D., work at a national or international lab or at Cambridge University…,” Padilla said. “I have high ambitions to one day revolutionize the field of physics.”