Laura Fang

• PhD student
• CDM
• University of Melbourne
• Road-tripping Adelaide to Sydney (2025)

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

Imagine a big bowl of delicious soup. It’s filled with bits of carrot, potato, noodles, and chicken in a flavourful broth. The broth brings the ingredients together and helps them mix, stick together, or float apart.

Our world is like a bowl of soup. Everything (including you!) is made up of incredibly tiny things called particles, which we can think of as the ‘ingredients’ in our soup. These particles are held together to make up the things in our universe, and interact with each other through forces – this is like the broth of the soup. We call the collection of the particles and forces we know of currently as the “Standard Model”.

Currently, the Standard Model is not complete – there are still some missing ingredients that we know must exist, but we don’t know about their properties. These missing ingredients are what we call “dark matter”. In my work, I’m looking at a particular type of dark matter and how it might fit in with the Standard Model, and I want to see if we could one day detect this dark matter with big experiments.

How did you get to where you are today?

My journey has been a series of spontaneous career-altering decisions that, with many strokes of luck, have been the right choices that led to where I am today.

For most of my life before my undergrad degree, I had wanted to be a maths teacher. However, when I received my offer letter for a teaching degree after high school, I felt unfulfilled and decided to switch to a Bachelor of Science with the goal of majoring in physics instead. Despite the seemingly random decision at the time, I fell in love with physics quickly, and went on to complete my Bachelor’s degree and subsequently, an honours degree..

Throughout my undergrad and most of honours, I was set on pursuing a career in experimental physics in photonics. It wasn’t until a few days before PhD applications were due that I realised I would be very sad if I never saw a Feynman diagram again, and made a leap of faith to apply for a PhD in theoretical particle physics, which I’m happily working on today.

What’s the best thing about your role?

Definitely the people! I’ve really enjoyed working with my team in my current project; I’ve learnt so much in just a short few months with their guidance. Also, I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with the University of Adelaide (where I did my undergrad and honours), and it has been very welcoming to come into this project with some familiar faces.

What are your interests outside work/physics?

I enjoy baking sweets and the occasional loaf of bread. I have my own cookie recipe, and I’m working on a few others. I also love driving places and exploring different corners of the world!

 

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