Plenary Speakers

Keynote Speaker: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Jocelyn Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics, work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor.

She has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now a visiting academic in Oxford and the chancellor of the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has been president of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, in 2008 became the first female president of the Institute of Physics for the UK and Ireland, and in 2014 the first female president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was one of the small group of women scientists that set up the Athena SWAN scheme.

She has received many honors, including a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2018. The public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster. In her spare time, she gardens, listens to choral music, and is active in the Quakers. She has co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme, Dark Matter; Poems of Space.

Caterina Vernieri

Caterina Vernieri received her Ph.D. on the CMS experiment from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, in 2014 and then moved to Chicago for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She joined SLAC in 2018 as a Panofsky Fellow and moved to the ATLAS experiment, and in 2022 she became Assistant Professor. 

Throughout this time, she has been devoted to studying the Higgs boson using data from the LHC. She co-led the group in the CMS experiment studying the Higgs decay to b quarks at the time that this important decay process was finally discovered in the data. At SLAC, Caterina is working with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC with a focus on Higgs physics. She is responsible for the integration activities at SLAC of the new ATLAS Pixel Inner Tracker detector. 

She was also co-convener of the group on Higgs boson properties in the US national study of the future of particle physics.

Jacqueline Benitez

Distance Learning Educator

Assistant Manager of Planetarium Programs at the California Academy of Sciences

Read her Physicist Profile on the APS website.

Ji Won Park

Ji Won is a Machine Learning Scientist in the Prescient Design team at Genentech. Her current research probes hierarchical, sparsity-inducing structures in the data that can inform sampling, inference, and adaptive decision-making. She focuses on developing algorithms in MCMC sampling, posterior inference, and Bayesian optimization inspired by challenges in molecular design.

In her past life as a cosmologist, she combined hierarchical Bayesian models and deep learning to infer the Hubble constant from an astrophysical phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing. She interned at NASA Ames and the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute while pursuing her Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford University, which she completed in 2022 under the supervision of Phil Marshall and Aaron Roodman. She holds B.S. degrees in Mathematics and Physics from Duke University (2017).

Jocelyn Read

Jocelyn Read is a Professor of Physics at California State University Fullerton. Her research focuses on using gravitational-wave astronomy to answer questions in nuclear astrophysics, primarily through observations of neutron stars. She co-led the Extreme Matter team of the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra Collaborations from 2016-2022, including through the analysis of the first detected neutron-star merger, GW170817. She is now contributing to the development of the next-generation gravitational-wave observatory Cosmic Explorer. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and likes to spend time reading fiction and riding bikes with her family in Fullerton.

Monica Hansen

Monica Hansen serves as Head of Technical Operations for Google's Quantum AI Program.  She manages strategic and operational priorities to usher in multi-disciplinary quantum computing projects through the entire project lifecycle. Prior to her time at Google, Monica worked in the LED lighting industry for 20 years.  She was a principal in a consulting firm providing technical and market expertise in LED lighting and display technologies, and served as a technical advisor to the Department of Energy Solid State Lighting (SSL) Program. Monica also spent 13 years at Cree as a research manager contributing to product development in all areas of the SSL value chain, from MOCVD growth and chip fabrication to LED package design and fixture development.  She has authored or co-authored numerous scientific, peer-reviewed articles related to SSL, gallium nitride semiconductors, and optoelectronic devices and holds patents in these areas. She received her Ph.D. in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Nola Hylton

Nola Hylton, Ph.D., is a Professor in Residence in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, and Director of the Breast Imaging Research Group at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Hylton received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1979, and she obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University, California in 1985.

Dr. Hylton has been integrally involved in the development of magnetic resonance imaging for the detection, diagnosis, and staging of breast cancer. Dr. Hylton is an internationally known leader in the field of breast MRI for more than 20 years. Her search has addressed the clinical optimization and evaluation of breast MRI technology. Her current research program focuses on the development and clinical evaluation of MRI techniques for characterizing breast cancers and assessing their response to treatment. Her laboratory collaborates closely with a multi-disciplinary team of radiologists, surgeons, oncologists, and science researchers nationwide. This is to optimize MRI techniques for the clinical management of breast cancer patients.

Dr. Hylton is among the first group of scholars named the Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s Scientific Advisory Council. She served as co-leader for the DHHS office of Women’s Health International Working Group where she identified and addressed barriers to clinical dissemination of breast MRI. She also served as the institutional Principal Investigator of the NCI International Breast MRI Consortium, which is the first large multi-center clinical trial evaluating breast MRI for breast cancer diagnosing and staging.

Dr. Hylton has over 80 published research articles, and she has written 13 book chapters and over 130 abstracts.

Patricia Falcone

Patricia Falcone is the Deputy Director for Science and Technology at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). She is the principal advocate for the Lab’s science and technology base and oversees the strategic development of the Lab's capabilities. She is responsible for LLNL’s collaborative research with academia and the private sector, as well as its internal investment portfolio.

Falcone joined LLNL in 2015 after six years at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she served as the Senate-confirmed Associate Director of OSTP for National Security and International Affairs. In that capacity, she led a team that advised on the science and technology dimensions of national security policy deliberations and on federal support of national security research and development.

Earlier, Falcone held technical and management positions at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, including Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, and senior manager for Systems Analysis and Engineering.

Falcone chairs the advisory committee for the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is a member of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. She is a member of the Leadership Council of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and a commissioner on the National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers led by the Council on Competitiveness.

Falcone earned a B.S.E. in aerospace and mechanical sciences at Princeton University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Prineha Narang

Dr. Prineha Narang is a Professor in Physical Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she holds the Howard Reiss Chair. Prior to moving, she was an Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science at Harvard University. Before starting on the Harvard faculty in 2017, Dr. Narang was an Environmental Fellow at HUCE, and worked as a research scholar in condensed matter theory in the Department of Physics at MIT. She received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech. 

Her group works on theoretical and computational quantum materials, non-equilibrium dynamics, and transport in quantum matter. In 2023 she was appointed a U.S. Science Envoy by the State Department. Narang’s work has been recognized by many awards and special designations, including the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Physics, a Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society, 2022 Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society, Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Max Planck Award from the Max Planck Society, and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics all in 2021, an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, being named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review (MIT TR35). Narang has organized several symposia and workshops, most recently at the APS March Meeting on “Materials for Quantum Information Science”. 

Her continued service to the community includes chairing the Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting (2022) and the MRS-Kavli Foundation Future of Materials Workshop: Computational Materials Science (2021), as an Associate Editor at ACS Nano of the American Chemical Society, an Associate Editor at Applied Physics Letters of the American Institute of Physics, organizing APS, Optica (OSA), and SPIE symposia, and a leadership role in APS’ Division of Materials Physics. Outside of science, she is an avid triathlete, runner, and starting her mountaineering journey.