Yeah, there is the idea of putting them in space, so it’s within human reach to observe gravitational waves from the very early universe.

Well, that would be amazing because it might cause a controversy with religious beliefs.

Will it cause any more than there already is? Just because we saw gravitational waves that take us back to literally the very beginning doesn’t mean we’ll have an explanation for how the very beginning happened. Well, I don’t think it will help the controversy if there is any. It will just give us more information that the Big Bang either happened the way we thought, or maybe there will be a surprise and it didn’t happen the way we thought. And what caused the Big Bang?

Which means that you needed both creation and evolution to get to where we are.

I think that would be nothing new added to that debate.

There’s some important social issues that I would like to talk about. Did you face difficulties trying to achieve in science in a man’s world?

Personally, no. Do I think or observe that there is systemic bias out there? Yes, it’s out there. My own personal experience has been very positive, and I think it’s in part because I’ve had amazing mentors who don’t mentor me because I’m a woman—they mentor me because I’m a scientist.

But that doesn’t for a moment mean that I’m not aware that there are structural factors and bias out there that keep certain demographic groups out. But it hasn’t been my experience.

What about being an immigrant? Did you find yourself different? Did you have difficulty adjusting? Think about when you came to this country. Because once you became famous and appreciated, the world was yours.

That’s a good question. When I came to college, I came to an environment that was pretty welcoming. Certainly, I’ve had experiences of the same kind that others have had of being exoticized: “Oh, you’re from Pakistan, you must be somehow an exotic creature.”

I think if anything, it made me more determined. I wouldn’t even say they were negative experiences; they were more experiences where I encountered people who just didn’t know much about the rest of the world. So they had funny questions or funny expectations. I, on the other hand, even growing up in Pakistan, had much more awareness of what the rest of the world was like.