Sau Lan Wu

Some of the young experimentalists today are a bit too conservative. In other words, they are afraid to do something that is not in the mainstream. They fear doing something risky and not getting a result. I don’t blame them. It’s the way the culture is. My advice to them is to figure out what the most important experiments are and then be persistent. Good experiments always take time.
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Young students don’t always have the freedom to be very innovative, unless they can do it in a very short amount of time and be successful. They don’t always get to be patient and just explore. They need to be recognized by their collaborators. They need people to write them letters of recommendation.
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The only thing that you can do is work hard. But I also tell my students, “Communicate. Don’t close yourselves off. Try to come up with good ideas on your own but also in groups. Try to innovate. Nothing will be easy. But it is all worth it to discover something new.”
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Sau Lan Wu

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Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.