Chicago Business
By Danny Ecker – If there exists a point where religion and science intersect, Kawtar Hafidi may have found it. Raised a devout Muslim in Morocco’s capital, Rabat, Ms. Hafidi showed an early curiosity of the theoretical. “When I was little,” she says, “I used to tell my dad, ‘I want to learn what God is made of. I believe in him, but I don’t see him.’ “ Now a nuclear physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, Ms. Hafidi, 39, is getting closer to her goal. For the last 11 years, she has worked to advance the study of quantum chromodynamics, which describes how quarks—the most fundamental pieces of the universe—form protons, neutrons and other particles. (…) Specifically, Ms. Hafidi seeks to capture the moment when quarks become free, or transparent. Adjusting the accelerator’s speed and intensity, her team found conclusive evidence of an exotic, short-lived state in which quarks are so small they become invisible to other matter, enabling them to pass through a nuclear medium without interaction (…) Ms. Hafidi negotiated an obstacle-laden path to get this far. Her father, a middle-class bureaucrat in the Moroccan government, didn’t have the money to send her to college. Luckily, her grandmother and aunts—the youngest of whom is a physician—came up with the funds, in some cases by selling jewelry. “They would say, ‘We cannot let you waste your talent here,’ “ she says. After earning an undergraduate degree, she left Rabat to pursue a doctorate in physics at France’s University Paris-Sud before joining Argonne as a postdoctoral appointee in 2000. Ms. Hafidi dramatically disrupts stereotypes about Muslim women outside science, too. Her husband, Brahim, also an Argonne physicist, is the primary caregiver of their 6-year-old son, Omar. She was a member of the original Moroccan national women’s soccer team, in 1992, and has a brown belt in mixed martial-arts fighting.
