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Laura Mersini-Houghton was born in Albania and grew up under a totalitarian communist regime which, until its collapse in 1991, cut the country off from the rest of the world. Influenced by her father, Nexhat Mersini, a mathematician, she developed a keen interest in physics and, in 1994, won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US. Her first book, Before the Big Bang, describes her quest to illuminate the origins of our universe and prove that we are one of many universes in a much vaster multiverse. Mersini-Houghton is now professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, though she is currently in Cambridge, England, where she spends time every summer doing research.

How did life in a closed society shape your thinking?
I think it encouraged a greater love for freedom and for knowledge – whenever you are prohibited from finding out about a place beyond, that makes you only more curious. Also, because of the very grim reality of Albania, we had few distractions, so people were more thirsty for knowledge than I now see in the west. Also, there is the single-mindedness of wanting to find the answer and not really being impressed by the dominant philosophy of the field at the time.

What drew you to theoretical physics and cosmology in particular?
Cosmology has all the most fascinating questions that I’d been daydreaming about since I was a child: where did the universe come from and what was there before it existed? As for working in theoretical rather than experimental physics, I’m really not a practical person – if put in a lab, I’d probably accidentally set it on fire.

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‘Cosmology has all the most fascinating questions that I’d been daydreaming about since I was a child’: Laura Mersini-Houghton in Cambridge. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

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