2024 SLAM MCs and Finalists
2024 SLAM MCs
Lydia Rachbauer (LBNL)
2021 finalist
At the inaugural 2021 BARS, I won 1st Place & People's Choice award with my talk "From Waste to Wanted: The Seaweed Story" on how we can harness the power of microbes to convert seaweed into biofuels, bringing home the BARS trophy to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. I have been a SLAM fan ever since, supporting other contestants on their Slamming Journey.
My current research still revolves around microbial communities to utilize a variety of waste carbon streams (e.g. industrial CO2 emissions, agricultural residues, and municipal solid waste) into low-carbon bioproducts, biochemicals, and biofuels.
Karuna Jetty (SNL)
2023 finalist
Karuna Jetty, currently a postdoc at Sandia National Laboratories, earned first place for her presentation at the lab's Technical Showcase last year. Her research focuses on the sustainable production of biochemicals and biofuels.
Benjamin Ofori-Okai (SLAC)
2021 finalist
Ben participated in the 2021 Bay Area SLAM. He works on studying materials under extreme conditions using high power lasers.
Brandon Zimmerman (LLNL)
2023 finalist
Brandon Zimmerman participated in BARS in 2023, representing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and talking about designing additively manufactured materials for extreme environments. He is a member of LLNL’s Computational Geosciences group and studies shock waves in heterogeneous materials.
2024 SLAM Presenters
Lisa Schlueter
Physical Sciences
“Why our Universe Shouldn’t Exist”
Gurjyot Sethi
Energy Sciences
“An Inspiration from Plants: Excitonic Superfluid”
Yumary Vasquez
Biosciences
“Going Viral... Literally: The Giant Virus Edition”
Jillian McCool
Physical & Life Sciences
“Racing for a Cure: Engineering Immune Cells for Improved Cancer Targeting"
Caspar Donnison
Physical & Life Sciences
“Agriculture and Solar Power: An Unlikely Alliance”
Nicholas Cross
Engineering
“Looking Inside Batteries to Predict Failure”
Jihoon Yang
Bioresource & Environ Security
“Who Took Our Treasure?”
Scott Monismith
Power Sources R&D
“Cracking Solid Electrolytes: Using Computer Simulation to Build Better Batteries”
Michael Leveille
Materials Chemistry
“Repurposing Natural Gas Infrastructure for Green Hydrogen Transport”
Sandra Beauvarlet
Energy Science/LCLS Directorate
“Lights, Camera, Electron!”
Cheng Peng
Energy Science Directorate
“Daily Adventures of a Computational Condensed Matter Physicist"
Tianzhe Xu
Accelerator Directorate
“Atomic Close-ups: Zoom Lens for Ultrafast Electron Camera”