Graduate Student

Eric joined the lab in Spring 2022 after graduating from New York University Shanghai. At NYU, he worked on entangling BECs with Prof. Tim Byrnes, as well as phase transitions in the Vicsek model and Ising model with Prof. Paul Chaikin, Charles Newman and Daniel Stein. Currently he is working on simulating many-body physics with strontium atoms.

Zhijing joined the group in fall 2021 after graduating from Xi’an Jiaotong University. In the past, she worked on condensed matter experiments with Prof. Mengkun Liu at Stony Brook University as an exchange student. After that, she switched her interest to AMO physics and did a gap year in Prof. John Doyle’s group at Harvard University where she worked on laser cooling ytterbium hydroxide. She did her first year of graduate school remotely in China and worked in Prof. ‪Matthias Weidemüller’s group on Rydberg atoms at USTC.

Vanessa joined the lab in Fall 2019 after earning her MPhil from University of Cambridge. Her masters work with Ulrich Schneider focused on building an experiment to study many-body physics in systems with a kagome geometry. Previously, she worked at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore with Loh Huanqian on quantum simulation and with Murray Barrett on quantum metrology. She is currently working on the Rubidium experiment, which applies cavity-QED to study different phenomena such as matter-wave interferometry and momentum exchange physics. 

Alec completed his undergraduate studies at UC Santa Barbara. He began in research working on a collaboration between Professors David Weld and Ania Jayich, constructing a UHV apparatus for studying surface decoherence of nitrogen vacancy centers. He then transitioned to the Weld lab’s ultracold lithium-7 apparatus, investigating transport dynamics and many-body chaos in Floquet lattice systems.

Will grew up in Half Moon Bay, California. While pursuing a B.S. in Physics at UC Santa Barbara, he began his optics career as an intern at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. There he studied high-temperature superconductors with optical pump-probe, synchrotron, and terahertz spectroscopy systems. After graduating in 2017, he developed phased laser arrays for the Breakthrough Starshot program and extensively traveled North America as a touring musician. Will started his Ph.D.