Pre-Conference Career Workshop

Midhat Farooq

Midhat is the careers senior program manager at the American Physical Society. Within this role, she develops career development programs and resources for students and early career physicists.

Betsy Tanenbaum

Betsy Tanenbaum is the Associate Director of Student Success & Alumni Engagement for the Knight Campus Graduate Internship Program at the University of Oregon and has been supporting the careers of alumni scientists from the program for nearly 10 years. Focused on student success, Betsy’s role includes strategic student recruitment, student support, facilitating the program’s inclusion and diversity programming, and providing life-long support for our alumni. She is a Certified Trainer in Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue, a 2020 graduate of the University of Oregon’s Leadership Academy, a UO DREAMer Ally, a 2024 and 2019 recipient of the Knight Campus Diversity & Inclusion Award, and a 2018 recipient of the UO Outstanding Employee Award.

Sophy Shin

Dr. Soyoung Shin is a physicist and a quantum educator with a diverse background in experimental atomic physics, computational physics, and quantum information theory. As a quantum strategist at IBM, she develops educational materials for a global audience. She expresses her deep commitment to the next generation of scientists through direct student mentorship as an APS career mentoring fellow.

Veronika Kruse

Dr. Veronika Kruse is a theoretical nuclear and atomic physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Labs who specializes in calculating physical processes relevant to the interiors of stars such as our Sun. They also spend time with summer student interns to develop their physics and mathematics skills as well as provide one-on-one mentoring advice.

Amalia Fernandez

Dr.  Amalia Fernandez received her Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Grenoble University in 2012, where she studied Yb-based heavy fermion materials under pressure and low temperatures. She later conducted postdoctoral research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on high-energy density experiments at the National Ignition Facility and other U.S. laser facilities. Since 2020, she has been a Program Officer for the Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) initiative at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Claudio Emma

Dr. Claudio Emma is a Staff Scientist at the FACET-II National User Facility at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from King’s College London, his master’s from Imperial College London, and his PhD from UCLA working on high-efficiency free electron lasers. He briefly consulted for Radiabeam Technologies on undulator magnet designs for high-power free electron lasers before his postdoc at SLAC. He was awarded the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program award in 2023 for his research on generating and diagnosing extreme electron beams for advanced accelerators, which is the current focus of his work.