What was the first amazing discovery you made?

finding what looked like these tiny spiral galaxies hidden inside crystals called garnets in rocks from the Himalayas in India.

And so these crystals are only a few millimeters across.

They're really, really tiny.

But when we use a laser to measure the chemistry of different elements and chemicals in those minerals, what we found is that the chemistry is distributed in these crazy spirals in all these different crystals.

And they look exactly like pictures of galaxies that you might see in space, those beautiful spiral patterns of stars.

And what was even more exciting was not only were these things really beautiful, was that these chemical patterns and these tiny, tiny minerals held clues to how the rocks themselves had been squashed and stretched and twisted more than 10 million years ago as the Himalayan mountains were forming.

At the end of your career, what big scientific question would you most love to see answered?