Meet Lisa Dyson, Ph.D!

Dr. Dyson was born and raised in southern California, went to Brandeis University for her bachelor's in math and physics (1997) and then went on a Fulbright Scholarship to Imperial College London where she got a Master's degree in physics, studying Quantum Field Theory. She earned a PhD in physics from the MIT Center for  Theoretical Physics in 2004, studying quantum gravity, general relativity, and string theory. She is the 4th black woman in history to get a degree in theoretical high energy physics (out of 6 total, as of 2023). She then did a post doc at UC Berkely while working at Lawrence Berkely National Lab, and held positions at Stanford, UCSF, Princeton, and the Boston Consulting Group.

She is the founder and CEO of Kiverdi, a biotechnology company that uses carbon transformation technologies to develop sustainable products for commercial applications, including agriculture, plastics, and biodegradable materials. She is founder and CEO of Air Protein as well. Using NASA technology dating back more than half a century, Dr Dyson and fellow scientist John Reed, found a way to whisk elements taken from the air with live cultures to produce protein that's combined with culinary ingredients to yield a "a meat alternative that does not require a compromise between taste, nutrition and climate threat."  

Meet Daniel Alabi, Ph.D! Dr. Alabi was born and raised in Nigeria. For his undergrad, he attended Carleton College where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and computer science. He is finishing up his doctoral degree from Harvard University. Data science is one of his main interests right now as he just started a postdoctoral position at the Data Science Institute and the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Meet John Dabiri! Dr. Dabiri received a B.S.E in mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. He furthered his education and achieved his M.S in Aeronautics from Caltech. From the same school, he obtained a Ph.d in Bioengineering with a minor in Aeronautics. Currently, he serves as the Centennial Chair Professor at Caltech. Dr. Dabri is connecting his physics interests, which includes fluid mechanics and flow physics, to sustainability. Some of his current interests include biological fluid dynamics in the ocean, wind energy, and new experimental methods. He serves as the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board.  He, also, serves on the Council of Advisors for the Biden Administration which advises on science and technology. 

Meet Adedoyin John  Akintayo! Dr. Adedoyin obtained his bachelors from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. From the same school, he achieved his Ph.D in meteorology. He has the distinction of being one of few Africans still in Africa who have studied atmospheric dynamics over tropical Africa. His Ph.D dissertation was very useful in modeling the dynamics of tropical mesoscale systems.  He served as the General Secretary(1988-2000) of the Society of African Physicists and Mathematicians (The society is now the African Physical society as of January 2010). 

Meet Mike Bromfield. He is from Jamaica where he was an engineer working on construction. He came to the US and was eventually hired as a construction engineer for the National Synchrotron Light Source II( NSLS-II), a US department of energy office of science user facility located at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His current job roles for NSLS-II are project engineer and research space manager. Overall, he designs and modifies infrastructure and beamline areas. He takes on the responsibility of making sure the spaces are safe and allows for research to be done in there. The current project that is being worked on is the NEXT-II Beamlines.

Meet Gabriel D. Gwanmesia, Phd. He is a professor of Physics and Engineering. Currently, he is in the division of Physical and Computational Science. His work is in mineral physics where he applies high temperature and high pressure to Earth materials to further understanding of how their properties, both physical and chemical, influence their geological behavior. For his doctorate thesis, he adapted hot-pressing techniques in the uniaxial spilt sphere apparatus at Stony Brook University. He applied his techniques in order to synthesize polycrystalline specimens of important Earth materials at high pressures. As a result, his high-pressing techniques gained recognition in high-pressing labs across the world. His technique also have applications in producing materials for energy and industrial applications 

Meet Dr Leopoldo Pando Zayas! He is originally from Cuba. He won the Silver Medal International Physics Olympiad in Warsaw, Poland as a high schooler. He then got his MS (1995) and PhD (1998) from Moscow State Univeristy in Russia. He has had positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, and at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. He is now a professor at University of Michigan. His work is in understanding quantum gravity and gauge theories using a string theory description. Currently, he wants to understand and generalize gauge/gravity correspondence. 

Meet Dr Ayana Arce! She is a professor at Duke University. Dr Arce was born in Lansing Michigan and got her degree in physics from Princeton in 1998. She went to Harvard for her PhD in physics and finished in 2006. She worked on the CDF (Collider Detector at Fermi Lab) at Fermi Lab. Subsequently, she did a post doc at Lawrence Berekely National Lab and currently she works on the ATLAS experiment while at Duke, focusing on the calorimeter detector, jet substructure reconstruction, and the use of jet tagging in diboson resonances.

Meet Dr Luke Davis! Dr Davis was raised in the UK and finished his undergraduate and early graduate studies with an MS in physics at Swansea University(2011-2016). He then studied at University College London and got his PhD in theoretcial physics in 2020. He is also an applied mathematician, specializing in biophysics. He uses these degrees and skills to study complexity in living systems (polymers, soft matter, programmable DNA, control systems). He has held positions at the University of Toronto in Canada and University of Luxembourg. He is now doing research under the mathematics department of University College London.