YPPDO Recent Physics Alumnae Panel with Ariana Hackenburg, Sylvia Xin Li, Catherine Matulis, and Savannah Thais

Please join us for a virtual panel about the career paths taken by Yale PhD Students. We have two recent alumni that are postdocs and two that have gone into industry. Their bios are below.
Ariana Hackenburg: completed her PhD with the MicroBooNE experiment in 2018. After graduating, she transitioned into industry through the Insight Data Science program. She is currently a Machine Learning Engineer at Wayfair, where she builds frameworks, models, and data pipelines at scale.
Sylvia Xin Li: is a postdoc in Prof. Michael Strano’s group at MIT. She is currently working on 2D quantum materials and their applications. She graduated from Prof. Mark Reed’s group at Yale in 2018. Her PhD research focused on bio-inspired nanofluidics and nano-confined electrochemistry for energy storage. She was a Nottingham Prize finalist in 2018. As a member of the DOE-EFRC Early Career Network, she organized a series of career workshop seminars.
Catherine Matulis: is an engineer in the Engineering Development Group at MathWorks. Since starting at MathWorks in June 2020, she has been working on a development project with Simulink Coverage and providing technical support for MATLAB and many of its toolboxes. Catherine received her PhD in Physics from Yale in May 2020. While at Yale, she was in the PEB program and worked in Damon Clark’s lab, where she studied contrast adaptation in Drosophila visual circuits.
Savannah Thais: is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, where she focuses on machine learning (ML). Her physics-related projects include building faster, more efficient ML-based algorithms for the High-Luminosity LHC and on using physics constraints to inform ML architectures. She also works on social-good-focused ML projects, including models of opioid abuse behavior in Appalachia and data-driven community needs assessments for vulnerable populations. She sits on the Executive Board of Women in Machine Learning, the Executive Committee of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, the founding Editorial Board of the Springer AI & Ethics journal, and she serves as the ML Knowledge Convener for the CMS experiment at CERN.
In this panel, these alumnae will discuss their application/interview process, current work, and advice for graduate students and current postdocs applying for their next position.
Host: Yale Physics Professional Development Organization
Sponsored by: Yale Department of Physics and the Yale Wright Laboratory
Questions? Email emma.castiglia@yale.edu
RSVP required: https://forms.gle/EqnZY8N3n1RK93Z37 (need to be signed into Yale gmail, email emma.castiglia@yale.edu if you do not have one)