Jefferson Lab in Newport News can, at times, feel like a United Nations meeting — scientists from Italy, Chile, Japan and dozens more countries frequent the nuclear physics research center.
Pashupati Dhakal stands out among the international crowd.
Part of a small but growing number of people from Nepal living in the United States, Dhakal's story starts in a small village in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains.
His father, the village's school principal, stressed academics. Because the village did not have electricity, Dhakal spent countless evenings reading with a kerosene lamp. He would often wake in the morning to find his face blackened with soot.
High school presented another problem: it took two hours to walk to the nearest one, located in Pokhara, Nepal's second-largest city. Dhakal had to move in with his grandfather, who lived near the school.
"If my grandfather was not there, I don't know where I'd be right now," Dhakal said. "Many people did not get that opportunity."
He did well in school and was accepted at Tribhuvan University, which required another move, this time to Nepal's capital, Katmandu. While earning undergraduate and master's degrees, Dhakal decided he would become a physicist.
He graduated at the top of his class and received a gold medal from Gyanendra Shah, then king of Nepal. He taught in Nepal for two years before arriving at Boston College where, as a doctoral student, he had to teach an undergraduate class.
"I'm pretty sure they didn't understand anything I was talking about," he said, half-joking about the difficulty of teaching in English.
Dhakal is part of a wave of Nepalese — some were granted U.S. citizenship, others have student or work visas — to arrive in the U.S. in the last 20 years. While two countries have been friendly since the 1950s, the U.S. did not relax immigration policies until the 1990s.
As a result, the number of American citizens claiming Nepalese ancestry jumped from 2,616 in 1990 to more than 50,000 in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Most live in large cities — New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas and Denver.
Dhakal spent four years in Boston, where he acclimated to American culture and earned a second master's degree and a doctorate. He arrived at Jefferson Lab, officially the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, in the fall of 2010.
He works with a team of scientists who study how to better utilize niobium — the superconducting metal that the lab and other particle accelerator facilities, such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, use to smash atoms together .
A recent first-time father, Dhakal said he misses living in a metro area like Boston, but he is enjoying the weather in Hampton Roadsand his work at the lab.
"I'm hoping to stay here because I really like what I do," he said.
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