#SoCaltech: Ahmed Soliman
“Coming from Egypt, I’d never seen ice in my life until I got to the South Pole. The first time I was there, my lab mates told me, ‘We’ve never seen an Egyptian here before.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ Then the station manager kindly printed out the Egyptian flag for me, and they took my picture at the geographic South Pole. The second trip, I posted a video on my Facebook page that said, ‘Has anyone realized that this is a place in the world that has 24 hours of daylight? You have to bring wood to block out the window to make it feel like nighttime.’ No one believed me! The Egyptian media reported on my posts, and a lot of people contacted me. A STEM school in Egypt sent me an invitation about doing a live video to encourage and inspire students to study science, to explain our experiment, and to show some daily life from the South Pole. I received follow-up invitations from schools in Palestine, Jordan, and many others. I also presented an educational talk to a school in Pasadena after I came back. These videos spread rapidly on social media and got millions of views. I went to the South Pole to do the science that I’m interested in, but I didn’t realize all of this would happen. I’m really happy that this influenced a lot of people.”
Ahmed Soliman (MS ’17, PhD ’23), a postdoctoral research fellow at JPL/Caltech, made two trips to the South Pole as a PhD research fellow in the Observational Cosmology group at Caltech. Soliman and colleagues developed and deployed the BICEP Array telescope to search the cosmic microwave background for evidence of inflationary gravitational waves and to probe the physics of the early universe. You can watch his Everhart Distinguished Graduate Lecture, “Imaging the Beginning of Time from the South Pole,” on Caltech’s YouTube channel.
#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.