Inspired by their experiences in college and elsewhere, these Pathfinders are passing by the typical, well-trod career paths and blazing their own trails. We'll explore the unconventional approaches these Big Ten alums and faculty are taking to work.

 

It's nature's greatest fireworks display: the supernova death of a bright, rare supergiant Wolf-Rayet star -- already several hundred times larger in diameter than our own sun -- which sends white-hot astroparticles flying millions of miles in multiple directions at close to the speed of light.

 

For Mauricio Bustamante, a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State's Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (CCAPP), that sheer magnitude is fascinating. He spends much of his time studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the largest explosions in the universe, via simulations of those levels of energy release.