Speakers

Dr. Brianna Mount is the lab director of the BHSU Underground Campus (BHUC), which is a cleanroom facility on the 4850' level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). This facility houses high purity germanium (HPGe) detectors to fill the niche of low background counting at SURF. She is a member of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter search collaboration. Dr. Mount is also the director of several outreach activities. She is the PI of the BHSU Underground Science Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program and has served on the NSF Physics REU Leadership Group (NPRLG) executive committee. She is also the lead organizer of the BHSU APS Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) in 2016 and 2020 and is the current past-chair of the National Organizing Committee for CUWiP.

Latrelle Bright is a director, performer and arts advocate. Though she has directed numerous productions, her interest in storytelling extends beyond tradition to projects around social justice and the environment. Projects include: co-producer of The Gun Play(s) Project with Nicole Anderson-Cobb, PhD; The Water Project, devised with eight community members; Journey to Water, connecting African Americans with regional water sources, a collaboration with Prairie Rivers Network through a Catalyst Initiative Grant from the Center for Performance and Civic Practice; Stories in the Water, a solo piece that explores deeply rooted relationships black people have with our most precious resource which premiered at Memphis Fringe; a Sappi: Ideas that Matter funded project entitled For Colored Girls Who Weather Storm that will transform poetry of local women and girls into a graphic novel. Recently an interdisciplinary devised project about the quantum world with physics professor Smitha Vishveshwara, Quantum Voyages premiered on campus and traveled to Boston for the American Physical Society Conference and she co-directed This is the Ground for Opera on Tap NYC with Jerre Dye at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her most recent collaboration, Joy of Regathering, premiered at KCPA, Fall of 2022. Latrelle received her MFA in Directing from The University of Memphis, was a TCG Young Leader of Color and an Associate Member of Stage Director's and Choreographers Society.

Aida El-Khadra received her PhD in 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles, after receiving her diploma from the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. She held postdoctoral research appointments at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Ohio State University before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1995. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, a recipient of a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and a Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator Award. In addition to a number of UIUC research and teaching awards she has also been named a Fermilab Distinguished Scholar and received a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics in 2022. El-Khadra works on topics in theoretical high energy physics, where she has made significant contributions to the development of lattice quantum chromodynamics. Her focus is on precision calculations that are needed to interpret measurements in high energy experiments. She is a leader of the Fermilab Lattice and MILC collaborations, and is chair of the Steering Committee of the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative.

Dr. Thushari Jayasekera is currently an Associate Professor of Physics in Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She is currently the undergraduate academic adviser and the undergraduate program coordinator for the school of Physics and Applied Physics. She grew up in Sri Lanka and completed Physics major bachelor's degree with First Class Honors in University of Peradeniya. She graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, with Prof. Kieran Mullen and Prof. Michael A. Morrison. She did her postdoctoral work with Prof. J. W. Mintmire at Oklahoma State University, and with Prof. M. Boungiorno Nardelli and Prof. K. W. Kim at North Carolina State University. Dr. Jayasekera's research expertise/interests are in Multi Scale Modeling Approaches for various applications. She has experience working with electron structure, electron/heat transport of low dimensional materials with first principles Density Functional Theory (DFT). Her current research interests extend to using her expertise in DFT and combine it with classical approaches such as Molecular Dynamics to study the interactions of Proteins with small molecules to understand biological processes.

Angela Kou is an experimental physicist specializing in superconducting circuits and topological materials. She did her graduate work at Harvard University on microscopic effects of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Angela's postdoctoral research at Yale University was focused on superconducting qubits, and particularly on the fluxonium. Angela then worked as a senior researcher in the Microsoft Quantum Lab at Delft where she supervised the circuit QED group. Angela is currently an assistant professor in the UIUC physics department.

Dr. Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler's work focuses on simulating the primordial liquid the Quark Gluon Plasma that existed microseconds after the Big Bang and studying the interior of neutron stars. She finished her PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2010. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellows at the University of Sao Paulo, Columbia University, and University of Houston. From 2017-2019 she was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. In 2019 she joined the faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as an Assistant Professor. She is currently on the executive committee for the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics and was previously on the RHIC & AGS User's Executive Committee. She received the 2018 Alfred P Sloan Fellowship, the 2018 Department of Energy Early Career Award, is one of the co-founders of the MUSES collaboration where she is the cyberinfrastructure convener.

Smitha Vishveshwara is a quantum condensed matter physicist who explores diverse realms including those of superconductivity, nanomaterials, out-of-equilibrium behavior, proteins, and black holes. Her career path led her to the East and West coasts, and finally to Urbana-Champaign as a faculty member in the Physics department. She now collaboratively combines her passion for physics and the arts through creating theater, music, dance, and other work on the quantum world and the cosmos.

Helvi Witek is an expert on gravitational wave physics, numerical relativity and strong-field tests of gravity. She obtained her PhD at the University of Lisbon. From there she moved on to postdoc positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Nottingham. Helvi was a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Barcelona and a Royal Society University Research Fellow in London, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in 2020.

Teryl Brewster, MA, Assistant Director of Social Justice Leadership, University YMCA, Room 228 Teryl holds a Bachelor degree in Sociology with a minor in Computer Science and Religious studies and a Masters in Sociology, both from Western Illinois University. Her professional experience includes eight years of working with underrepresented minority students at the University of Illinois in the area of advocacy and mentoring. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a focus in evaluating retention and transition programs for minority students at predominately White institutions. Starting her college career as a first generation, low income non-traditional college student, Teryl has a strong interest in improving the climate of higher education institutions. Teryl oversees the I-Journey Workshops on Request and the Social Justice Educators.

Lance Cooper is a condensed matter experimentalist and the Associate Head for Graduate Programs in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently the chair of the Illinois Physics graduate admissions committee, co-PI on the Illinois Sloan University Center for Exemplary Mentoring -- which aims to broaden participation of underrepresented PhD students in STEM departments -- and the site leader for the Illinois Physics APS Bridge Partnership Program.

Sarah is a second-year graduate student in the Dept. of Physics at UIUC. She received undergraduate degrees in Physics and French from SIU Carbondale, where she was president of their SPS organization and spent her final year studying at the National Institute for Applied Sciences in Lyon, France. At Illinois, Sarah's research is in theoretical quantum information science and she organizes the department's French club.

Yoni Kahn is a theoretical physicist and an assistant professor at UIUC whose research focuses on dark matter detection. He is the co-author of "Conquering the Physics GRE" and has given several webinars and presentations on grad school preparation.

Irene Lira-Andsager is the coordinator of undergraduate recruiting, research, and placement at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She graduated from her undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics in December 2017 and from her master's degree in Civil Engineering in May 2020, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Irene is passionate about supporting students in their study of physics as well as addressing the roadblocks faced by underrepresented students in physics.

Pam has been the Outreach Coordinator and Research Experiences for Undergraduates program coordinator for the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center since 2018. She holds a BS in Physics from Youngstown State University, and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from UIUC. She participated in a Physics REU program at Penn State when she was an undergraduate, and is thrilled to coordinate an REU program now!

Kate Timmerman is the executive director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a catalyst for advancing academic and industrial efforts in the science and engineering of quantum information. The Exchange is a collaboration between the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University and more than 30 industry partners. With the Exchange, Kate fosters emerging research partnerships, builds education and workforce development initiatives, and is growing the Chicagoland quantum economy. She is currently a board member of P33, a private sector initiative to turbocharge Chicago’s tech economy; ARCS Illinois, which supports Illinois graduate students by providing financial awards in STEM; and chairs the advisory board of QuSTEAM, an NSF initiative to build a national undergraduate curriculum for quantum information science and engineering. Kate earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Davis and her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.

Mallory Conlon is the outreach coordinator for the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute HQAN. She holds BS and MS degrees in astronomy from UIUC, where she led and developed outreach programs for the university’s Astronomical Society, reaching thousands of people in the greater Champaign-Urbana area. As HQAN’s outreach coordinator, she works with faculty and staff from UChicago, UIUC, and UW-Madison to create and run engaging outreach and education programs designed to broaden participation in and excitement for quantum science.

Valerie Goss obtained her doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, after completing research at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis. She is an associate professor of chemistry at Chicago State University, where she designs modified DNA nanostructures that will be useful in molecular electronics. Applications of this work include binding studies on mica, silicon, graphene, and meteorite surfaces for eventual use in circuits and sensing devices. Currently, Dr. Goss serves as the Work Force Development Lead and researcher on a collaborative project focused on quantum sensing in biophysics and bioengineering. Dr. Goss also has master's degrees in Geological Sciences from the University of Notre Dame and in Biochemistry from Loyola University of Chicago. Her areas of experimental and technical expertise include scanning microscopy of DNA nanostructures, XPS, UHV techniques, XRD, clean room, electron beam lithography, and POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) Teaching in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory. Dr Goss' work is supported by the Illinois Space Grant Consortium, NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation.

I currently live in Chicago and graduated from UIUC in May 2019 with a degree in Engineering Physics and a Minor in Informatics. After graduation, I started working directly at a huge tech consulting firm called Accenture as an Advanced Application Engineering Analyst. (entry-level tech consultant). In terms of my day-to-day job I do a mixture of strategic and project management work for a global Pharma client in their Cloud and Data and Analytics practices, focusing on driving efficiencies, coordination and stakeholder management, and ensuring delivery excellence for our projects. While at UIUC I was the co-president for the Society for Underrepresented Physics Students (SUPS) a member of the Navigators campus ministry, and a Project Manager at Illinois Business Consulting (IBC, our student-run consulting firm on campus). I also spent time working in the physics department as a student worker and spent a summer on campus doing research with Professor Willenbrock for our campus solar farm. I also switched career directions at least 5 times during undergrad and love talking to people about career direction, interviewing, and the amazing breadth of things you can do with a physics degree :)

Celia Mathews Elliott is a science writer and technical editor with primary responsibilities in departmental and research administration in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has extensive experience in grant and proposal writing and the funding of scientific research in universities. She has presented technical-writing and proposal-writing workshops at Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), and National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), as well as numerous institutions in the former Soviet Union. She has presented four webinars for the American Chemical Society on scientific communications and proposal writing and contributed to a technical-writing resource for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She answered questions on technical writing in two Reddit\science "Ask Me Anything" appearances, and her lectures on scientific communications have been downloaded by people from more than 90 countries. Among other professional awards, she was the American Physical Society's Physics Haiku grand champion in 2004.

Sarah is a second-year graduate student in the Dept. of Physics at UIUC. She received undergraduate degrees in Physics and French from SIU Carbondale, where she was president of their SPS organization and spent her final year studying at the National Institute for Applied Sciences in Lyon, France. At Illinois, Sarah's research is in theoretical quantum information science and she organizes the department's French club.

Azel is a fourth-year graduate student working in Fahad Mahmood's group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her undergraduate degree in Physics in 2019 from Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan). At UIUC, her research focus is coherent THz control of intercalated transition metal dichalcogenides. In her free time, she is also a competitive amateur ballroom dancer and music trivia fan.

Hi, I’m Chloe! I am a first year graduate student working in the Witek group on numerical relativity. On a typical day, you can find me going for a walk, playing with the Einstein toolkit, and working on problems sets with classmates.

Danielle is a third-year graduate student working in Elizabeth Goldschmidt's group at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Our group explores rare-earth AMO for applications in Quantum Information, and they fabricate and study rare-earth quantum devices. 

Sara is from a small town in New Hampshire, and I've always been a math nerd. She first got hooked on experimental atomic physics while working in Martin Zwierlein's lab while she was an undergraduate at MIT. She took a year off before grad school to work in a lab in Wuhan, China, because she wanted to improve her language skills and see more of the world. Then, she moved to Boulder, Colorado to do her PhD in Jun Ye's lab, where she worked on optical frequency atomic clocks. After that, she climbed Denali, then did a postdoc at UC Berkeley, where they made the world's most intense CW laser in order to give a 1/4 wave shift to a 300 keV electron beam, to perform phase contrast electron microscopy on biological macromolecules. She really treasured that opportunity to learn more about molecular biology; she thinks all those little molecular machines and feedback loops are magical. Finally, she decided to switch to industry, and has been working at Quantinuum (formerly Honeywell Quantum Solutions) for the past two years, where she is currently on the integrated photonics team.

Paige Frederick is a quantum software engineer at ColdQuanta. Prior to that, she worked at Microsoft developing software for superconducting hardware. She is a University of Michigan alum.

My academic background is in atomic physics, where my doctoral research was experimenting with quantum information processing using trapped ions as qubits. After graduate school I worked for five years in a corporate environment at Northrop Grumman developing novel superconducting circuit technology. Currently I am a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. My role here is Research Software Engineering, primarily supporting astrophysics collaborations and astronomical surveys like the Dark Energy Survey by building cyberinfrastructure and developing scientific applications.

I'm a first year physics grad student in condensed matter theory. I love playing chess, guitar and am really enjoying learning how to cook. I'm very excited to be here!

Brianne Gutmann (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at San José State University. She does physics education research with expertise in adaptive online learning tools, identity-responsive mentoring and community building, and macroethics in science education. She received her PhD in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, where she focused on mastery-style online learning for engineers in a large preparatory physics course. In her postdoctoral work at Texas State University, she co-developed and implemented curricula to engage students in conversations about ethics, science and society, with a research interest in how to best support students and instructors in these conversations. She recently finished a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship at the National Science Foundation, supporting and working with the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program. She is also an organizer for the Access Network, a national network of student-led organizations working for equity in STEM. 

Marisa Romanelli is a third-year graduate student in Prof. Madhavan's group at UIUC, where they study magnetic and topological materials using scanning tunneling microscopy. Before coming to UIUC, she got her BS in physics from Boston College.

Emily Waite is a graduate student working on superconducting island arrays under the direction of Nadya Mason. Emily is also the president of the Women & gender Minorities in Physics (WGMP) group at UIUC, which is a graduate-oriented group focusing on bringing our community together.

Amie is a two time alumna of the University of Illinois, having earned a B.A. in English as well as a M.Ed in Diversity & Equity in Education. As an undergraduate student, Amie worked at the Women’s Resources Center as peer educator for the First Year Campus Acquaintance Rape Education (FYCARE) Program. Most recently, Amie taught English and Journalism at Oakwood High School, and she previously worked as a Graduate Assistant for Diversity and Social Justice Education coordinating I-Connect. In her new role at WRC, Amie will be leading our efforts to explore gender equity across all its many intersections and support the leadership of students of all genders as they work to improve campus climate and promote gender justice worldwide. Amie finds peace in a good book, a cup of tea, and cuddling with her cats; and, finds passion in powerful women, live music, and the Y Thai Eatery.

Hania Al-Hallaq received her A.B. in Physics from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the University of Chicago. She is currently Professor in Radiation Oncology at the University of Chicago. She investigates the use of medical images to inform treatment selection, guide treatment positioning, and assess treatment response following radiotherapy. Her research background in texture analysis and expertise as a clinical radiotherapy physicist has enabled her to contribute significantly to translational cancer research in several institutional and national collaborative efforts.

Zheng Feng Lu, Ph.D., DABR, FAAPM is a Professor of Radiology and a Clinical Diagnostic Physicist at the University of Chicago. She was born and raised in Mainland, China. She received BS in Acoustics from Nanjing University in 1986, MS in Underwater Acoustic from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1989, and Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1994. From 1994 to 2011, she was a faculty member in the Department of Radiology at Columbia University. She became ABR board certified in Diagnostic Radiological Physics in 1997. She joined the Department of Radiology at the University of Chicago in 2011, where she is the Section Chief of Clinical Physics and the Program Director of the Residency Program in Clinical Imaging Medical Physics. She serves as a US expert at the IEC Technical Committee 87 Working Group 9 on ultrasound pulse-echo diagnostic equipment. She also serves on various committees in the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).  

Dr. Patch received BS and PhD degrees in applied math from Stanford and UC Berkeley, respectively. She won postdoctoral fellowships supported by the National Science and A v Humboldt foundations. She joined the group in GE's Corporate Research Center that developed digital x-ray flat panels to develop cone-beam CT reconstruction algorithms. In 2005 she returned to academia to pursue thermoacoustic imaging, first developing reconstruction algorithms and then building an experimental system for ex vivo thermoacoustic imaging of surgical specimens. Her first experiments in thermoacoustic range verification were performed at US Dept of Energy Labs (LBNL and ANL), but more recent results were obtained using a clinical synchrocyclotron. Her spin-off company is supported in part by a two year SBIR award from the NIH.

I am a second-year physics PhD student at UIUC, aiming to study condensed matter systems through the lens of quantum information.

Sarah is a second-year graduate student in the Dept. of Physics at UIUC. She received undergraduate degrees in Physics and French from SIU Carbondale, where she was president of their SPS organization and spent her final year studying at the National Institute for Applied Sciences in Lyon, France. At Illinois, Sarah's research is in theoretical quantum information science and she organizes the department's French club.

Azel is a fourth-year graduate student working in Fahad Mahmood's group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her undergraduate degree in Physics in 2019 from Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan). At UIUC, her research focus is coherent THz control of intercalated transition metal dichalcogenides. In her free time, she is also a competitive amateur ballroom dancer and music trivia fan.

Dr. Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler's work focuses on simulating the primordial liquid the Quark Gluon Plasma that existed microseconds after the Big Bang and studying the interior of neutron stars. She finished her PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2010. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellows at the University of Sao Paulo, Columbia University, and University of Houston. From 2017-2019 she was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. In 2019 she joined the faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as an Assistant Professor. She is currently on the executive committee for the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics and was previously on the RHIC & AGS User's Executive Committee. She received the 2018 Alfred P Sloan Fellowship, the 2018 Department of Energy Early Career Award, is one of the co-founders of the MUSES collaboration where she is the cyberinfrastructure convener.

Katie Ansell is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois. She completed her PhD in Physics Education Research at Illinois in Spring 2020 (yikes) and continued on in her new role to teach at the introductory level, support innovative pedagogy in the introductory labs, and research the negotiation of power dynamics and student expertise in the introductory lab classroom. Outside of work, Katie enjoys swimming, yoga, baking, and wandering around West Urbana with her energetic and silly four-year-old daughter.

Brianne Gutmann (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at San José State University. She does physics education research with expertise in adaptive online learning tools, identity-responsive mentoring and community building, and macroethics in science education. She received her PhD in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, where she focused on mastery-style online learning for engineers in a large preparatory physics course. In her postdoctoral work at Texas State University, she co-developed and implemented curricula to engage students in conversations about ethics, science and society, with a research interest in how to best support students and instructors in these conversations. She recently finished a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship at the National Science Foundation, supporting and working with the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program. She is also an organizer for the Access Network, a national network of student-led organizations working for equity in STEM. 

Maggie is the Secondary Education Partnership Coordinator for the U of I Physics Department. She is primarily responsible for coordinating the NSF-funded high school physics partnership, the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools Partnership (IPaSS) and is part of the team who runs the Learning Assistants (LA) program for the introductory physics courses. In this role, she works on the programmatic side of these initiatives while also contributing to their aligned research efforts as part of the Physics Education Research Group. Prior to joining the Department, Maggie taught high school physics for eight years in Boston and Baltimore. Maggie served as Department Chair and Physics Team Lead during those years and was twice featured as a Master Class presenter at the Expeditionary Learning National Conference. In addition to her work on IPaSS and the LA program, Maggie is known for creating science-themed music video parodies of popular songs, a hobby she began with her students as a high school teacher. Last year, she and Professor Fahad Mahmood teamed up with members of the condensed matter physics community at U of I to create a music video parody of Madonna's Material Girl called "Condensed Matter Girl." The video showcases the strength of women in Condensed Matter at U of I, from female graduate students to the esteemed women on the Condensed Matter faculty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie-pfRCFpg0

Elizabeth Goldschmidt is an assistant professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research is in experimental quantum optics and quantum information. She received her bachelors in physics from Harvard University in 2006 and her doctorate in physics from the University of Maryland as a Joint Quantum Institute graduate fellow in 2014. Her graduate research was on single photon technologies and optical quantum memory. She was a National Research council postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 2014-2016 where she studied ultracold and Rydberg excited atoms in optical lattices for quantum simulation. She was a staff scientist at the US Army Research Laboratory studying quantum optics in solid-state systems before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in the fall of 2019.

Kristina is an experimental quantum information staff scientist at Los Alamos National Lab. She joined the lab in 2021 as a postdoc after completing her doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Prof. Paul Kwiat. She did her undergrad in Physics at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Outside of the lab, she enjoys knitting, hiking, running, and spending time with her family, which includes a dog and cat for those animal lovers.

Anne Sickles is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois. She students the quark-gluon plasma--the hottest matter ever created in the lab--by colliding nuclei together at the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

I am a second-year physics PhD student at UIUC, aiming to study condensed matter systems through the lens of quantum information.

Ellen is a second-year physics PhD student studying condensed matter theory at UIUC. She received her bachelor's in physics from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she co-founded the university's Women in Physics group. As an undergraduate, she studied transition metal dichalcogenides using density functional theory, and she participated in summer research programs at institutions including the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Her current research is focused on characterizing Majorana bound states in topological materials.

Débora is a PhD candidate at UIUC working on nuclear theory. She enjoys knitting and playing the bass guitar in her free time.

Kristen is a third year graduate student in the UIUC physics department. She studies modified theories of gravity with the Illinois Relativity Group and has started an outreach project using virtual reality to teach students about general relativity. Her specific research focus is on constraining modified theories of gravity with gravitational wave data.

Britt Carlson is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, IL. She earned a BA in biochemistry from Earlham College and a PhD in biomolecular chemistry from University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She has a deep passion for undergraduate education and has been community college faculty since 2009. In addition to teaching chemistry, Britt is also the program director for the NSF-funded programs Parkland Science Scholars (NSF S-STEM), a scholarship and mentoring program for low-income science majors, and PRECS: Phenotypic Plasticity Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF REU). 

Valerie Goss obtained her doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, after completing research at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis. She is an associate professor of chemistry at Chicago State University, where she designs modified DNA nanostructures that will be useful in molecular electronics. Applications of this work include binding studies on mica, silicon, graphene, and meteorite surfaces for eventual use in circuits and sensing devices. Currently, Dr. Goss serves as the Work Force Development Lead and researcher on a collaborative project focused on quantum sensing in biophysics and bioengineering. Dr. Goss also has master's degrees in Geological Sciences from the University of Notre Dame and in Biochemistry from Loyola University of Chicago. Her areas of experimental and technical expertise include scanning microscopy of DNA nanostructures, XPS, UHV techniques, XRD, clean room, electron beam lithography, and POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) Teaching in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory. Dr Goss' work is supported by the Illinois Space Grant Consortium, NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation.

Elizabeth is a Senior studying Engineering Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to studying at UIUC, Elizabeth attended Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, IL. In May 2021 she graduated from there with her Associates in Engineering Science and then transferred to UIUC.

Hi, my name is Mya Powers-Nash and I am a senior at Chicago State University studying chemistry. My interest in chemistry really grew in high school when I had the opportunity to work on interesting laboratory projects. I was also inspired by my research experiences at Chicago State University and University of Chicago. My ultimate professional objective is to work as a forensic chemist. I find the inherent difficulties of locating, gathering, and evaluating clues from data using science to be fascinating. I particularly aspire to one day be a prominent member of a research team that uncovers big scientific discoveries. When I am not improving my academics, I love creating art and helping in the community!

Joan Dreiling received her PhD in atomic physics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She held a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Institute of Standards in Technology in Gaithersburg, MD. She started at Quantinuum in 2018, and her current work there focuses on bringing the next-generation quantum computers into commercial operation.

Dr. Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler's work focuses on simulating the primordial liquid the Quark Gluon Plasma that existed microseconds after the Big Bang and studying the interior of neutron stars. She finished her PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2010. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellows at the University of Sao Paulo, Columbia University, and University of Houston. From 2017-2019 she was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. In 2019 she joined the faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as an Assistant Professor. She is currently on the executive committee for the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics and was previously on the RHIC & AGS User's Executive Committee. She received the 2018 Alfred P Sloan Fellowship, the 2018 Department of Energy Early Career Award, is one of the co-founders of the MUSES collaboration where she is the cyberinfrastructure convener.

Danielle is a third-year graduate student working in Elizabeth Goldschmidt's group at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Our group explores rare-earth AMO for applications in Quantum Information, and they fabricate and study rare-earth quantum devices. 

Celia Mathews Elliott is a science writer and technical editor with primary responsibilities in departmental and research administration in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has extensive experience in grant and proposal writing and the funding of scientific research in universities. She has presented technical-writing and proposal-writing workshops at Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), and National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), as well as numerous institutions in the former Soviet Union. She has presented four webinars for the American Chemical Society on scientific communications and proposal writing and contributed to a technical-writing resource for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She answered questions on technical writing in two Reddit\science "Ask Me Anything" appearances, and her lectures on scientific communications have been downloaded by people from more than 90 countries. Among other professional awards, she was the American Physical Society's Physics Haiku grand champion in 2004.