Background
A picture of me in Houston, TX.
Three cultures have shaped who I am today ...
I was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq. Much of my childhood was spent there. When the war started in Iraq, my family was directly impacted by all the unrest in the country. My mom and dad decided that it would be safer for the future of our family to immigrate to Syria.
I was in my second semester of sixth grade when we moved to Syria. I continued my education there. My parents worked tirelessly to ensure that we, my brother and I, did not lose a year of education. While we were in Syria, my family applied for immigration through the United Nations. Halfway through ninth grade, my family qualified for immigration to the United States.
We arrived to the U.S. at the end of 2010, and we slowly started a new life as a family. I continued my high school education in Nashville, TN. I became very interested in learning English and building on the basics that I learned in my English courses in Iraq and Syria. During my senior school in high school, I was fascinated by my physics course (Thank you coach Gabe for a wonderful lecture style!) and that became a major factor in deciding what major to choose in college.
After graduating from high school, I decided to go to Nashville State Community College, to figure out what I wanted to pursue at a low cost while I worked at McDonald's. I chose physics as my major, and I took all the physics and math courses I could while working on finishing my general education courses.Â
Around age 19, my family and I became U.S. citizens, and I graduated from community college and had an Honors Transfer Fellowship to Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), where I finished my physics bachelor's in science. I received my Master's in physics in the Spring of 2021 from Texas A&M University, and I'm continuing on to my PhD in experimental high energy nuclear physics at Texas A&M University.