Berkeley Physics celebrates the hard work and accomplishments of the Class of 2021!
The Physics 2021 Commencement Acknowledgement Celebration will include the following events on Sunday, May 16th, 2021:
Virtual Toast to the Graduates
Date: Sunday, May 16th, 2021
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, PT
Location: Zoom link will be provided to graduates closer to the day of the event
Details: Please join the Physics faculty, staff, graduates, and families to toast the 2021 graduates. We will ask a few faculty, staff, and students ahead of time to prepare short toasts to the graduating class. We will also open the mic to other faculty and staff who would also like to say a few congratulatory words, as time allows. Then, we will offer breakout rooms for graduates to visit with staff, faculty, and peers.
Watch the 2021 Physics Commencement Acknowledgement!
Closed captioning is available by clicking the "CC" button in the lower right-hand corner of the video frame
2021 Key Speakers
James Analytis
Professor and Chair, Department of Physics
Bob Jacobsen
Professor, Department of Physics and Dean of Undergraduate Studies, College of Letters and Science
Principal Speaker
Erika Hathaway
Undergraduate Student Speaker, Department of Physics
Jonathan Liu
Graduate Student Speaker, Department of Physics
Frances Hellman
Professor, Department of Physics and Dean of Physical Sciences,
College of Letters and Science
Physics Prizes and Awards
Undergraduate Speaker
Erika Hathaway
Graduate Speaker
Jonathan Liu
Department Citation
Shaunak Modak
Lars Commins Memorial Award in Experimental Physics
Roger Huang (Advisor, Yury Kolomensky)
Jackson C. Koo Award in Condensed Matter
Emma Regan (Advisor, Feng Wang)
Student Services Awards
Charlie Cummings
Pratik Sachdeva
2020-2021 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Awards
Nicolas Aldana
Benjamin Concepcion
Mario D'Andrea
Stefan Divic
Elizabeth Dresselhaus
Jordan Dudley
Haruka Ichikawa
Raj Kanchan
Kevin Langhoff
Malcolm Lazarow
Molly Oshun
Jaxon Stuhr
Zachary Weinstein
Kohtaro Yamakawa
Physics BA Degrees
Summer 2020
Kazbek Alimov
Ivan Chernyshev
David Enriquez
Stefan Ivanovic
Jacob Lyons
Myles McAvoy
Connor McWard
Alejandro Pelcastre-Ramirez
Arjun Savel
Joseph Shih
Jacob Sleczkowski
Jiabao Zhou
Katherine Zhou
Fall 2020
Adam Barker
Curtis Berger
Andrew Chang
Shamin Chowdhury
Sean Clayton
Armine Dingilian
Toby Dixon
Max Dornfest
Jackkenyon Eberitzsch
Holden Gill
Melanie Hamaguchi
Maria Herraez Galvez
Todd Hirtler
Andrew Hoffman
Shangqing Huang
Heather Jackson
Misael Gonzalez
Spencer Kofford
Max Lee
Dongzoon Li
William Liu
Yukei Murakami
Allison O'Brien
Giovanni Pecorino
Armando Reynoso
Patrick Sicurello
Xiao Tan
Matthew Thompson
Elicia Tiano
Susana Torres-Londono
Stephen Zhang
Spring 2021
David Abramovitch
Emil Albrychiewicz
Earl Russell Almazan
Meera Aravinth
Armando Arevalo
Debayan Bandyopadhyay
Jonathan Bautista
Wyatt Blair
Merrell Brzeczek
Huichao Chang
Richard Chen
Matthew Chu
Sean Conlon
Peter Connick
Matthew Cuevas
Charlie Cummings
Abhijnana Das
Eric Deck
Evan Deddo
Nicolas Deshler
Akshey Dhar
Connor Duncan
Moniish Elanchezhian
Kevin Ghaffari
Ruotian Gong
Lizbeth Palafox
John Gooding
Rebecca Gore
Alex Green
Katie Griffith
Hans Gundlach
Ian Haines
Arda Hatay
Erika Hathaway
Rebecca Hicks
Patrick Hinrichs
Jared Hoofard
Lanxiang Hu
Hongxin Huang
Jordan Huang
Logan Jaeger
Kian Jansepar
Michael Jennings
Samuel Johnson
Elijah Kane
Keshav Kapoor
Rohith Karur
Yonna Kim
Grant Kirchhoff
Daniel Klyde
Mason Kohls
Kyubin Kwon
Daniel La Rocco
Storm Lin
Yibin Ling
Benjamin Lloyd
Yinfeng Lu
Ethan Lu
Sandra Lucero-Ramirez
Kieran Manning
Matthew McColgan
Jack Melin
Whitaker Mercer
Nishant Mishra
Shaunak Modak
Maya Moore
Amrut Nadgir
Suhasiny Naik
Anderson Park
Gianluca Pedrani
Derek Perera
Savannah Perez-Piel
Gabriel Perko-Engel
Andrei Petrache
Jiuhua Qu
Alexander Qualls
Stuti Raizada
Kim Lionel Rivera
Fatima Rodriguez
Zachary Ross
Rahul Sahay
Jose De Jesus Salcedo Jr
Michael Santos
Alec Shelley
William Sheu
Shawn Shin
Kyusang Soh
Katerina Stloukalova
Mia Stripling
Ran Tao
Khoa Tran
Carter Turnbaugh
Jacob Tycko
Jonathan Vahala
Teemu Virtanen
Ethan Ward
Clayton Westrum
Jiaxi Xu
Huiwen Yang
Ethan Yeh
Yibo Zhao
David Zheng
Yuanqi Ivy Zhou
Summer 2021
Michael Davis
Vivian Kim
Michael Leite-Garcia
Sahil Patel
Rebekah Shtayfman
Jairang Yarlagadda
Stefano Faubel
Engineering Physics BS Degrees
Fall 2020
Samuel Chaim-Weismann
Dexter Lee
Angelica Perlas
Shreyas Srinivasan
Esteban Tabares
Alexander Ungar
Wiley Wadsworth
Spring 2021
Jeffrey Braun
Pamela Hernandez
Henry Jin
Ethan Klein
Alan Llamas
Siddhant Mehrotra
Zhi Peng
Aditya Sengupta
Peter Tatum
Ellie Wang
Richard Wang
Summer 2021
Eric Zhong
Physics MA Degrees
Summer 2020
Omar Ashour
Fall 2020
Andrea Herman
Summer Zuber
Spring 2021
Jiaxi Zhao
Armin Eghdami
Burhan Ahmed
Physics PhD Degrees
Summer 2020
William Berdanier
Advisor: Joel Moore
Universality in Non-Equilibrium Quantum Systems
Vir Bulchandani
Advisor: Joel Moore
Hydrodynamics of Integrable and Near-Integrable Quantum Systems
Yi Chen
Advisor: Michael Crommie
Many-Body Ground States in Single-Layer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides
Elizabeth Hanson
Advisor: Stuart Bale
Multi-Spacecraft Observations of Collisionless Shocks in the Heliosphere
John Mark Kreikebaum
Advisor: Irfan Siddiqi
Superconducting Qubit Enabled Single Microwave Photon Detection
Robert Mcgehee Jr.
Advisor: Hitoshi Murayama
Discoverable Matter: an Optimist’s View of Dark Matter and How to Find It
Chirag Modi
Advisor: Uros Seljak
Reconstruction of Cosmological Fields in Forward Model Framework
Daniel Parker
Advisor: Joel Moore
Local Operators and Quantum Chaos
Pratik Rath
Advisor: Yasunori Nomura
Aspects of Holography and Quantum Error Correction
Arvin Moghaddam
Advisor: Raphael Bousso
Aspects of Generalized Entropy And Quantum Null Energy Condition
Adam Stooke
Advisor: Pieter Abbeel, Michael DeWeese
Advancements in Deep Reinforcement Learning: Algorithms and Implementations
Haoyu Sun
Advisor: Ori Ganor
Number Theory in 3d Gravity and from 4d Gauge Theory
Fall 2020
Samantha Dixon
Advisor: Saul Perlmutter
Using Empirical Models of Type Ia Supernovae to Prepare for Next-Generation Cosmological Measurements
Jeffrey Epstein
Advisor: Kranthi Kiran Mandadapu, Oskar Hallatschek
Statistical Mechanics and Hydrodynamics of Active Fluids
Justin Gerber
Advisor: Dan Stamper-Kurn
Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics with a Locally Addressable Quantum Gas
Charles Hill
Advisor: Adrian Lee
Sensitivity Simulations and Half-wave Plate Polarization Modulators for Cosmic Microwave Background Observatories
Robert Kealhofer
Advisor: James Analitis
Paths to interacting topological semimetals
Tsz Leung
Advisor: Dan Stamper-Kurn
Interacting Ultracold Bosonic Atoms in Geometrically Frustrated Lattices
Sylvia Lewin
Advisor: James Analitis
Symmetry-specific probes of strongly correlated materials: Angle-dependent magnetoresistance and resonant ultrasound spectroscopy
Chiu-Yun Lin
Advisor: Alessandra Lanzara
Symmetry-Controlled Spin Entanglement in Quantum Materials
Tairu Lyu
Advisors: Feng Wang
Dirac Fluid Physics in Monolayer Graphene
Thomas Mittiga
Advisor: Norman Yao
Sensing the local charge and strain environments surrounding Nitrogen-Vacancy centers in diamond
Meng Wu
Advisor: Steven Louie
Spin-Orbit Coupling, Broken Time-Reversal Symmetry, and Polarizability Self-Consistency in GW and GW-BSE Theory with Applications to Two-Dimensional Materials
Victoria Xu
Advisor: Holger Müller
Lattice atom interferometry in an optical cavity
Song Zhang
Advisor: Irfan Siddiqi, K Whaley
Measurement-based quantum feedback controls for quantum computation
Weicheng Zhong
Advisor: Holger Mueller
Precision measurement of the fine-structure constant with atom interferometry
Spring 2021
Samuel Kohn
Advisor: Kam-Biu Luk
Measurement of the Neutrino Mixing Angle Theta-13 Using Neutron Capture on Hydrogen at the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment
Yen-ta Huang
Advisor: Dung-Hai Lee
Regularizability and bosonization of relativistic massless fermion
John Groh
Advisor: Adrian Lee
Design and Deployment of the Simons Array Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Instrument
William Livingston
Advisor: Irfan Siddiqi
Da An
Advisor: Hartmut Haeffner
Electric-field noise scaling and wire-mediated coupling of remote ions in a novel elevator surface trap
Fangzhou Zhao
Advisor: Steven Louie
Topological Electronic Properties and Optical properties of Graphene Nanoribbons and Carbon Conjugated Systems
Sophie Weber
Advisor: Jeffrey Neaton
Prediction and Understanding of Functional Topological and Spintronic Materials from First Principles
Margaret McCarter
Advisor: Ramamoorthy Ramesh
Synchrotron-based techniques for studying emergent phenomena in complex oxide heterostructures
William McCormack
Advisors: Maurice Garcia-Sciveres and Marjorie Shapiro
Observation and measurement of photon-induced WW production in pp collisions at \sqrt{s} = 13 TeV using the ATLAS detector
Jacob Leedom
Advisor: Mary K. Gaillard
Topics in the Axions, Supergravity, and the String Swampland
Niladri Chatterji
Advisors: Peter Bartlett and Michael DeWeese
Vyassa Baratham
Advisor: Kristofer Bouchard
Constraining Ill-Posed Inverse Problems in Neuroscience via Biophysically Detailed Forward Simulation
Benjamin Stahl
Advisors: Alex Filippenko and Dan Kasen
Trash to Treasure: Extracting Cosmological Utility from Sparsely Observed Type Ia Supernovae
Summer 2021
Micah Brush
Advisors: John Harte and Oskar Hallatschek
Macroecological patterns out of steady state
Venkatesa Chandrasekaran
Advisor: Raphael Bousso
Ahmet Coskuner
Advisors: Kathryn Zurek and Lawrence Hall
Dark Matter Detection Phenomenology
Siva Darbha
Advisor: Daniel Kasen
Hannah Klion
Advisor: Eliot Quataert
Jonathan Liu
Advisor: Hernan Garcia
Investigating the Dynamics of Non-Equilibrium Behavior in Eukaryotic Transcriptional Regulation
Jonathan Ma
Advisors: Patrick Naulleau, Andrew Neureuther, Naomi Ginsberg
Stephen Martis
Advisor: Oskar Hallatschek
Eco-evolutionary dynamics in high dimensions
Christopher Mogni
Advisor: Petr Horava
Stephen Randall
Advisor: Petr Horava
Pratik Sachdeva
Advisors: Michael R. DeWeese and Kristofer E. Bouchard
The impact of correlated variability on models of neural coding
Ian Shirley
Advisors: Susan Hubbard and Edgar Knobloch
Fernando Torales Acosta
Advisor: Barbara Jacak
Isolated Photon Hadron Correlations in pp and p—Pb Collisions
Tianrui Xu
Advisor: Joel Moore
Quantum Dynamics of Correlated Fermions In- and Out-of-Equilibrium