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Sanjana Curtis
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Physics at Oregon State University, working on the origin of elements and explosive transients. Many of the elements that make up our bodies and our world were created in stars, supernovae, and mergers of compact objects like neutron stars and black holes. My research seeks to uncover these astrophysical origin stories, and through my science communication work, I strive to share them widely with everyone interested in astronomy. I came to the US as an international student in 2013, and have lived and worked in many different states and countries before joining Oregon State. Most recently, I was an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley. More information about me can be found on my website: https://www.sanjana-curtis.com
Sanchita Dhirwani
Sanchita is a Senior Quantitative Developer at Google, specialising in building AI/ML strategies for trading and FX hedging within the Treasury team. Her career path exemplifies how the analytical and problem-solving skills honed during her physics training translate seamlessly to the world of finance. Before Google, Sanchita worked as a Data Scientist at Capital Group, where she developed AI/ML strategies for sales and marketing, demonstrating her ability to apply quantitative methods to diverse business challenges. Her experience also includes quantitative research roles at a high-frequency trading firm and Deutsche Bank in India, where she utilised her deep understanding of complex systems to develop and implement trading strategies.
Sanchita's academic foundation is in physics, with degrees from the University of Delhi (Undergraduate and Masters in High Energy Physics) and the University of Alabama (Masters in Particle Physics). She further honed her quantitative finance skills by obtaining a Masters in Financial Engineering from UCLA. During her time at Alabama, she contributed to neutrino research in the nEXO project, further showcasing her ability to tackle complex scientific problems.
Driven by a passion for leveraging her quantitative expertise, Sanchita is committed to exploring new frontiers and contributing to data-driven decision-making across diverse fields. She believes in the power of analytical thinking to unlock innovative solutions and drive impactful outcomes.
Olive Eilbott
Olive Eilbott is a Ph.D. candidate and NSF graduate research fellow in experimental physics working with cold atoms at UC Berkeley. Through their mentorship, advocacy, and organizing work they promote diversity in physics and seek to support students feeling out of place. In their research work, they currently study an intricate magnetic dance performed by levitated laser-cooled atoms as choreographed by light. When they're not photographing atomic dances, they're photographing larger-scale things
Katherine Lohff
Katherine Lohff works in Electromagnetic Compatibility engineering at Zoox, conducting immunity and emissions tests on the robotaxi's modules. Born in Anchorage, Alaska, she grew up camping, hiking, and fishing. While earning a physics degree with honors at the University of Montana, Katherine explored diverse fields, including work for Alaska’s Department of Fish & Game (ask for bear stories!) and an apiary. In 2016, she moved to the Bay Area, first joining a startup where she did everything from field testing ground-to-air radio platforms to ordering lunch. She joined Zoox in 2022. In her free time she enjoys throwing ceramics and hiking with her fiancé, Scott, and their charismatic Shiba Inu.
Marjorie Shapiro
Marjorie Shapiro received her AB from Harvard in 1976 and her PhD from Berkeley in 1984.
She has been a Professor at Berkeley and a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab
since 1990. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the
American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Shapiro is an experimental particle physicist whose interests lie in probing the most basic
interactions in nature. There now exists a theory of the Strong and Electroweak interactions
(“the Standard Model”) that has been tested to high accuracy and that explains almost all
existing experimental data. The great success of this theory provides a framework for asking
even more basic questions: What is the physics that generates quark and lepton masses?
What determines the size of the Fermi constant? What is the mechanism responsible for the
CP non-invariance observed in nature? It is such questions that she and her collaborators
hope to address.
Many extensions to the Standard Model offer possible answers to these questions. In a large
class of theories we expect new phenomena to appear when quarks or leptons collide at
center-of-mass energies in the range of 100 GeV to 1 TeV. At the present time, hadron
colliders are the only means of reaching these energies.
Shapiro is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Her research on ATLAS spans many topics including searches for TeV scale gravity and for
Supersymmetry, measurements sensitive to the Higgs boson coupling to top, bottom and
charm quarks, measurements of the production properties of the Top quark, studies of charm
production in association with W-bosons and measurements of the properties of high p T jets.
Mae Teo
Mae Teo received her PhD in Physics from Stanford University in 2020, focusing on astrophysical probes for new physics beyond the Standard Model. She was a quantitative researcher at Citadel building models for equity trading, before joining UC Berkeley as a Lecturer in 2023. She is currently building a startup in stealth.
Victoria Xu
Victoria Xu is an Assistant Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. She received her B.S. in Physics from UC Santa Barbara, and her Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley. For her thesis, she worked with Professor Holger Müller on trapped cavity atom interferometers for precision measurements and fundamental physics. She then joined the MIT LIGO Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Associate, where she worked on commissioning the frequency-dependent squeezing upgrade for broadband quantum enhancement of the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors. At Berkeley, her group is focused on increasing the sensitivity of the LIGO detectors through quantum technologies and detector commissioning, and using LIGO technology to further push the sensitivity of trapped atom interferometers.