Without supernovae, life as we know it simply couldn’t exist—and yet, we don’t understand how these incredible explosions happen. Physicists at the University of Sheffield are part of a worldwide effort to finally figure this out by building Hyper-Kamiokande: a detector the size of a high-rise building, located deep underground inside a Japanese mountain.

In this talk, I will introduce this detector and then discuss some of the things I’ve learned in the past four years: about supernovae and fundamental particles, the process of doing science and the life of a PhD student.