Julianne Pollard-Larkin, an assistant professor of Radiation Physics, always loved math and science. As a teen, she once signed herself up for summer school because she couldn’t wait to take her first physics class. In college, she majored in math and physics, and today she holds a Ph.D. in biomedical physics.

But she’s more than just a physicist with a white board full of equations. Like her enthusiasm for Zumba workouts, her...