Paloma Zuerlein

Biography

My interest in Physics first began when I was thirteen, while reading the book From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll. The concepts were foreign and difficult for a middle school student to understand, but I struggled through them, sometimes reading a chapter two or three times before grasping the concept. But what was revealed to me was fascinating: I already knew, intuitively, many of the ideas Carroll described, but they were named things like “thermodynamics” and “entropy.” Physics, I realized, is merely making up rules (today, we largely call these rules “calculus”) to describe what we observe in the natural world!

Nine years later, I graduated with a degree in Physics from University of California Santa Barbara, after which I spent three months in Taiwan researching quantum computers. After returning to the US, I decided I wanted to show students how wonderful and strange Physics can be.

As someone born and raised in the Bay Area, I am familiar with the sort of pressure put on students in this high-octane environment. Many students are trying to split their attention between so many different subjects and activities that they need to direct their focus to learning subjects in an efficient manner. I want to teach students where to slow down, where to celebrate, and where to push themselves. I also want to show them that math and physics are not nearly as scary as they seem, and they can be interesting and intuitive in their own way. The best moments are when students ask the “what if” questions. What if there was no friction? What if this happened in space? What happens at the center of a black hole? That’s how I know they are thinking like a physicist!

In my spare time, I like painting, reading, playing video games, and petting my corgis Wayne and Garth.