Support educational excellence and training for current physics students
The UC San Diego Physics "Chair's Challenge" was established to support educational excellence and training for current physics students: young people who will go on to careers in industry, academia, and government. Whether their primary focus is in astrophysics, condensed matter, biophysics, particle physics, plasma physics, or atomic and molecular optics, they are our future, and deserve our support.
For undergraduate students, the primary goal is to strengthen the outstanding research opportunities that we offer. These funds will help support student fellowships and awards - both during the academic year and during the summer - and will increase their opportunities to gain hands-on experience in a research laboratory setting.
For graduate students, the primary goal is to provide outstanding travel, presenting and networking opportunities. These funds will help our students attend important symposia and conferences, which are crucially important to a well-rounded education experience.
Gifts of any size to the "Chair's Challenge", when combined with matching funds and other gifts, will make an impact on our students’ physics training and their ability to think critically and help solve the problems of tomorrow.
PAST CHAIR'S CHALLENGE FUND RECIPIENTS
Year 2023/2024
Anaya Valluvan, AAS 243 Winter Meeting, “Revisiting hot thermal solar flares: Data results from 3 years of Chandrayaan-2 XSM observations.”
Aniket Zodage, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, “Advanced Bacterial Genetics”
Biswajit Sahoo, INTERMAG 2023, Brazil, “Spin dynamics through phase transition on NdNiO3 thin films.”
Chesson Sipling, 2024 APS March Meeting, “Memory-induced long-range order in dynamical systems”
Elliot Kisiel, New Opportunities in Diffraction Microscopy, “Diffraction and Imaging Studies of Neuron-Mimicking Devices and Their Environments”
Emily Pan, 6th Joint Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics and the Physical Society of Japan (HAW23), “Testing and characterizing the performance of the CRYO ASIC for the nEXO experiment”
Megan Salek, Porous Semiconductors - Science and Technology Conference, “Photodegradation of Silicon Quantum Dots under High Intensity Light”
Jacob "Jake" Spisak, Nikhef Theory Seminar, “Dark population transfer mechanism for sterile neutrino dark matter”
Jyotsna Gidugu, American Physical Society's March Meeting 2024, “A study of dissipative models based on Dirac matrices”
Ryan Rickards Vaught, American Astronomical Society Meeting #243, “HII Region Electron Temperatures and Abundances in Nearby Galaxies Observed with Keck-KCWI and VLT-MUSE”
Simon Martin, 2024 APS March Meeting, “A critical phase induced by Berry phase and dissipation in a spin-chain”
Ting-Chun Lin, Quantum Information Processing, "Geometrically Local Quantum and Classical Codes from Subdivision" and "A new operator extension of strong subadditivity of quantum entropy"
Varun Ramaprasad, APS March Meeting, "Broadband terahertz spectroscopy in reflection of three-dimensional Dirac semimetal Cd3As2"
Weiheng Qin, American Physical Society March Meeting, “Coordination between sub-populations of interneuron in the spinal cord revealed by information theory”
Yuan Zhang, APS March Meeting 2024
Yuanhang Zhang, APS March Meeting 2024, “Collective dynamics and memory-induced long-range order in spiking oscillator arrays”
Yue Samuel Lu, Resolving Galaxy Ecosystems Across All Scales (at The Chinese University of Hong Kong), “Three Radial Zones in the Structure and Dynamics of High-z Cosmic-Web Filaments”
Yu-Hsuan "Eltha" Teng, 243rd American Astronomical Society Meeting, “Revealing the Drivers of CO-to-H2 Conversion Factor Variation and its Impact on Star Formation Efficiency across Nearby Galaxies”
Yu-Hsueh Chen, KITP program Correlated Gapless Quantum Matter, “Separability transitions in topological states induced by local decoherence”
Year 2022/2023
Alison McAnally, "Investigations into Electron Bursts"
Biswajit Sahoo, Intermag 2023, "Variation of Spin Hall Angle through phase transition of magnetic ordering in rare earths"
Cara Jensen, APS Physics March Meeting, "Robust control of replication initiation in the absence of DnaA-ATP ⇋ DnaA-ADP regulatory elements in Escherichia coli"
Dachuan Lu, APS March meeting, "Symmetric mass generation in 1+1d and 2+1d"
Fredy Ramirez, APS Division of Plasma Physics, "On the Resilience of Staircase Structure in a Melting Vortex Crystal Flow"
Jacob Saret, American Physical Society, Division of Plasma Physics 64th Annual Meeting, "Measurements of Temperature Evolution in Copper from Intense Proton Beam Energy Deposition"
Kelson Kaj, APS March Meeting 2023, "Mid-and Near-IR Pump-Probe Study of Quasiparticle Dynamics in Ca3Ru2O7"
Laura Jian, APS-DPP, "Correcting Thomson Scattering Electron Density Measurements Using Alignment Monitors"
Meng Zeng, APS March Meeting 2023, "Symmetric mass generation of 1+1d chiral fermion 3-4-5-0 model"
Russell D. Marroquin Solares, SACNAS National Diversity in STEM, "Ultra-Low Latency Machine Learning Applications in Particle Physics"
Rohan Shenoy, Two presentations: "EMD Neural Network Loss for the ECON-T ASIC Autoencoder, presented at Fast Machine Learning for Science 2022", "Deep Learning for the High Granularity Calorimeter, A3D3: Accelerated Artificial Intelligence Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery"
Roman Gerasimov, 241ST MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, "Evolution, atmospheres and spectra of stellar and substellar objects with non-solar chemical abundances in Milky Way globular clusters."
Ryan Rickards Vaught, 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, "HII Region Electron Temperatures and Abundances from Keck KCWI and VLT-MUSE Observations of Nearby Galaxies"
Ryan Thiermann, APS March Meeting, "Do bacterial cells allocate resources to maximize growth?"
Thomas Hong Tsun Wong, 2022 APS Far West Section Meeting, "Bridging the Gap of Demographic Tension in Tidal Disruption Events"
Ting-Chun Lin, Quantum Information Processing, "Good Quantum LDPC Codes with Linear Time Decoders"
Wanda Hou, Quantum to Business
Yu-Hsuan Teng, 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, "Connecting CO-to-H2 Conversion Factors to Molecular Gas Properties in Nearby Barred Galaxy Centers"
Ziyuan Ren, APS
Year 2021/2022
Chih-Chun Hsu, 240th American Astronomical Society Meeting, "Kinematics, Binaries, and Rotations of Ultracool Dwarfs with High-Resolution Near-Infrared Spectroscopy"
Haochen Fu, Gorden research conference, Poster I: "The molecular mechanism of chromosome replication initiation control"
Poster II: "A kinetic mechanism for temperature compensation in Biochemical oscillators"
Jason Platt, AGU Fall Conference, "Robust Forecasting Through Generalized Synchronization in Reservoir Computing"
Kelson Kaj, FiO LS (Frontiers in Optics and Laser Science), "THz Strong Coupling Between Metamaterials and Superconducting Josephson Plasmons"
Roman Gerasimov, 239TH MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, "Exploring the Ultracool Dwarf Population of globular cluster ω Centauri with Stellar Atmosphere and Evolutionary Modelling"
Ryan Thiermann, GRC Stochastics physics in biology, "Resource allocation and growth rate control in Bacillus subtilis (poster)"
Shruti Singh, AGU, "Hierarchical Forecasting and the Nonlinear Dynamics of Flooding Events, Resistance Movements and the Blues in New Orleans"
Yu-Hsuan Teng, FROM STARS TO GALAXIES II CONFERENCE
Venkata Avaneesh Narla, APS March Meeting 2022, "Community Assembly in Time-Varying Environments".
Zubenelgenubi Scott, SIAM Conference on the Life Sciences (LS22), "Protein Dispersion and Accumulation in the Endoplasmic Reticulum"
Year 2013/2014
Aisha Iyer, APS March Meeting 2014, “Mid-Infrared Variability of the Low Mass Stellar Binary TWA30 A and B”
Annie Khachatryan, WIP Conference
Ilya Valmianski, APS March Meeting 2014
Ivanna Escala, WIP Conference
Jacob Stanley, APS March Meeting 2014
Leandra Boucheron, APS March Meeting 2014
Prarit Agarwal, Kavil Institute for Theoretical Physics, 'New methods in non-perturbative phenomenon in quantum field theories.'
Shenglong Xu, APS March Meeting 2014, 'Sign problem free Monte Carlo simulation on itinerant ferromagnetism'
Wang Yang, APS March Meeting 2014
Yicong Ma, APS March Meeting 2014