Maaz Hayat

• PhD student
• CDM
• University of Melbourne
• Road-tripping in Tasmania in 2026

How would you describe your work to a 10-year-old?

Everything in the universe is made of tiny bits of “stuff” that we can’t see. These tiny things don’t behave like anything in our everyday life, they follow strange rules that we try to understand using maths.

I build ideas (called “models”) that are like puzzle guesses for how this invisible world works. Then I check if those ideas match what we actually see in experiments.

One of the biggest puzzles is dark matter, mysterious stuff in space that we know is there, but we don’t know what it’s made of. My job is to help figure out what dark matter could be and how it fits into the puzzle of the universe.

How did you get to where you are today?

A lot of physicists end up where they are because they never really grow out of asking “why?” and “what is actually true?”. I was the same. I chose to study physics and mathematics because they felt like the closest way to get real answers to those kinds of questions.

During my studies, I became more and more interested in the deepest layers of how the universe works. That’s what led me to theoretical particle physics—a field that tries to understand the most fundamental building blocks of reality, and the rules that govern them.

Now, I work on questions about things we still don’t fully understand, like dark matter, and try to build ideas that could explain what the universe is really made of.

 

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