Representatives to Physics Department Committees
2020-2021
- Colloquium Committee: Sarah Geller, Wenzer Qin, Shreya Vardhan
- Education Committee: Yifan Su
- Physics Values Committee: Rahul Jayaraman, Felix Knollman, Halston Lim, Alyssa Rudelis, Stella Schindler
- Admissions Advisory Council / Grads Advising Graduate Admissions (GAGA): Samuel Alipour-fard, Dominika Durovcikova, Danielle Frostig, Dhruva Ganapathy, Rahul Jayaraman, Mason Ng, Olumakinde Ogunnaike, Wenzer Qin, Stella Schindler, Kyungseop Yoon
- Samuel Alipour-fard
- Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA)
- Sam is a second year graduate student interested in quantum field theory and collider physics. He enjoys reading, dancing, and hiking.
- Dominika Durovcikova
- Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA)
- Dominika is a first-year student in the Astrophysics division, looking forward to spending the next 5-6 years studying the interface of GR and quantum physics through precision metrology. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, helping younger students get the skills and info they need to apply to awesome schools like MIT and is an avid ukulele player.
- Danielle Frostig
- Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA)
- Danielle works with the ground based instrumentation group to make a new survey telescope to study transients in the infrared sky. When not making astronomical instruments, Danielle enjoys making art and exploring New England.
- Rahul Jayaraman
- Physics Values Committee
Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA) - Rahul (he/him) is a second-year Astro student working on detecting transients and other weird astrophysical phenomena using TESS. When he’s not coding, he likes to drink coffee, read long-form feature articles, and marvel at all the dogs in Cambridge. He’s from California but, after five years in New England, still complains incessantly about the weather.
- Felix Knollman
- Physics Values Committee
-
Felix (he/him/his) is a first-year graduate student studying AMO physics and quantum info. He works with trapped ions in the Quanta group. When he is not in lab you will probably find him outdoors. The sports are always changing, but the current obsessions are biking and climbing.
- Mason Ng
- Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA)
- Mason (he series) is a third-year PhD student in the Astrophysics division, studying pulsations, thermonuclear burst oscillations, and other cool stuff with neutron stars. He has lived in Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia, before settling down into some relative permanence in Cambridge. In his free time, he works out, consumes international politics, and engages in advocacy projects with the GSC’s External Affairs Board.
- Olumakinde Ogunnaike
- Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA)
- Makinde is a third-year PhD in Leonid Levitov’s group in condensed matter theory. Though he grew up in Delaware, he is technically a Nigerian prince (and appreciates any and all financial aid while removed from his ancestral home). Often found in the department in African clothes, he enjoys sharing conversation about culture, sharing his love of chocolate, and sharing from his unreasonably large collection of tea. When not at MIT, he can be found working as an Resident Advisor in one of the Harvard undergraduate dorms and playing soccer in Boston.
- Wenzer Qin
- Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA)
Colloquium Committee - Wenzer is a second-year graduate student in the CTP studying cosmology and particle astrophysics, with a special interest in dark matter. She hails from Columbia, Missouri, and enjoys making digital doodles and playing with twisty cubes in her spare time.
- Alyssa Rudelis
- Physics Values Committee
- Alyssa is a third-year PhD student in Professor Vladan Vuletić’s experimental atomic physics group. At this point, she’s a little bit from each Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and California. When she’s not in lab, she enjoys baking sweet treats for her undergraduate residents as a Graduate Resident Advisor (GRA) in Maseeh Hall, dancing, decorating her apartment, writing creative non-fiction, and working on grad student advocacy projects.
- Stella Schindler
- Physics Values Committee
Admissions Advisory Council (GAGA) - Stella is a third-year in the Center for Theoretical Physics who works on QCD as her day job and dabbles in optics on the side. She grew up, went to college, and is now doing grad school from 1,191 miles away in St. Louis, Missouri, with her rough collie, Frodo. When not theorizing, she enjoys playing viola, painting, engaging in activism, and playing pranks on unsuspecting colleagues. A former Italian major, she looks forward to applying her knowledge of Machiavelli to governing PGSC.
- Yifan Su
- Education Committee
- Yifan started graduate school at MIT in Fall 2018. He studies the structrual changes in quantum materials in a timescale of several femtoseconds (one millionth of one billionth of a second) using Ultrafast Electron Diffraction. Outside lab, he enjoys cooking and billiards. He also keeps a habit of watching and reading stuff in Japanese to prevent his second foreign language from degrading.
- Shreya Vardhan
- Colloquium Committee
- Shreya Vardhan is a fourth-year graduate student interested in quantum chaos, hydrodynamics, and the AdS/CFT correspondence. She enjoys going on long walks, discovering new ice cream places, reading and playing tennis.
