As a high school student in Raleigh, NC, Ed became interested in the Hubbard model and in strongly correlated systems, but his efforts to understand them were foiled by the fermion sign problem. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Ed learned techniques of atomic physics by working to develop a waveguide atom interferometer in the lab of Prof. Mara Prentiss and helping to build a quantum gas microscope in the lab of Prof. Markus Geiner. Now he is using those same techniques — of atom trapping, optical lattices, and quantum simulation — to confront the boogeyman of his youth. The goal of the BEC II experiment in the lab of Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle is to realize the antiferromagnetic ordered state, and to eventually obtain the phase diagram, of the 3D Fermi-Hubbard model.