At the TUM School of Natural Sciences, our graduates demonstrate the value of a TUM education and inspire others to pursue their goals in higher education, contribute to innovation, and impact society. The NAT School reached out to a recent graduate to learn more about their path to university and becoming a scientist.

“I try to be as good of a scientist as I can. TUM has helped me to learn more about myself, as a whole person, to find out what I want out of life. In academics, you get to work on your passion project. You do it because of your love for the topic and nothing else.” – Dr. Martin Ha Minh

As a school child, Martin enjoyed disassembling things to figure out how they work. At after-school programs, he was drawn to the world of physics, “The physics teachers hosted a program where you could try out different experiments that you had seen on TV, movies, or YouTube”, he explains. Even though physics was not his best subject at school, he nonetheless decided that was the direction for him to use his creativity and develop the problem-solving skillset needed to be a successful physics student.

In 2015, Ha Minh went on to complete his bachelor’s degree in physics at TUM before joining the research group of Prof. Susanne Mertens (TUM and, at that time, the Max Planck Institute for Physics) for his MSc. After a growing up in Bavaria, Ha Minh ventured abroad for a study year in Japan at Tohoku University in 2016, where he was integrated into the laboratory, learned about how their research setups worked, and got a great deal of hands-on experience. Ha Minh describes his research activities at the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Antineutrino Detector-Zen experiment: "I worked in a clean room laboratory for an upgrade of the experiment and also participated in monitoring shifts at the underground detector site."

While working on his 2018 MSc thesis, his supervising professor Mertens’ research network opened the door for Ha Minh to visit the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (California, USA) with collaborators there. In the thesis, entitled “Bayesian Analysis of the First Data of the KATRIN Experiment”, he developed a statistical strategy and machine learning approaches to analyzing the KATRIN experiment.

It may be no surprise, but Ha Minh wasn’t finished with TUM after the excitement of his master’s degree. He continued with doctoral studies with Prof. Allen Caldwell (TUM, Max Planck Institute for Physics) and Prof. Elisa Resconi (TUM School of Natural Sciences) on developing various numerical methods to the IceCube observatory. NAT School asked Ha Minh why he became so interested in particle physics.

Ha Minh explains: “Particle physics in recent years has gone from being something that can mostly be completed in the lab to now, a time when we can achieve a lot on the computer. We are using numerical methods, machine learning, data science, statistics, AI, and that was something that really inspired me. So, I learned to take the information we got from our detector at the South Pole and see what we can get out of it.”

The thing Ha Minh likes the most about doing the PhD in physics was being able to find his creative ideas in the program: how to make things work, what can be done with this cool, fun technology. “Let’s say you have a lot of detector measurements; how do we infer the particle trajectory into something I can work on using machine learning?” asks Ha Minh. Rather than relying solely on the work of machines, physicists using this toolbox must continually ask, “Are we seeing what we think we’re seeing, or is it an artifact of the data? We cannot rely only on the machines; we still rely on humans to use their critical thinking.” 

During the doctoral program, he recognized something important for the next stage in his life. “I realized what I’m very good at doing: coming up with creative ideas for problem solving and working with other people to make these ideas happen. I got to hone those skills in the PhD,” he says, talent he can apply to his next career stage in industry. 

In conclusion of our discussion, the NAT School asked, “If you were to start all over again with your degree, would you do it in physics?” Like many students, the first year of university was a challenge, shifting from school to self-driven studies. Ha Minh says, “In my first year at university, I had some doubts – I was worried I wouldn’t pass my exams. Should I stop and do something else? But the subject was so interesting to me, and I kept at it until I found my place in physics.” He continues with advice for new first-year students in the field, “Just keep going. It's hard, it's a difficult thing to study. Keep working at it and finding joy in the things that you do. Also, be kind to yourself for doing it because it is not easy.”

Learn more about the TUM School of Natural Sciences’ different career paths: https://academics.nat.tum.de/en/career-paths

More information and links

• IceCube-Gen2 is the planned extension of the existing IceCube neutrino observatory, which operates at the geographic South Pole at a depth of over two kilometers in the Antarctic ice. The project aims to advance the detection and study of high-energy neutrinos from space with significantly increased sensitivity and resolution. IceCube-Gen2 is intended to enable new insights into the origin and mechanisms of the most energetic processes in the universe. The IceCube-Gen2 FIS project was submitted by the leading institutions DESY and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), with the Technical University of Munich as a partner institution.
• Prof. Allen Caldwell, Max-Planck Institute for Physics

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