Dr. Neelima Sehgal, an assistant professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy, wants to understand the earliest moments of the universe. Specifically, she wants to know what happened within one second after the Big Bang—the event believed to have taken place 13.8 billion years ago and took the universe from a tiny, dense, finite point to the infinite cosmos of today. But studying events that took place billions of years ago is no small feat.