EDUCATION AND MENTORSHIP: SUCCESS STORIES
Education is one of my primary missions. Training of young physicists and providing mentorship have always been a priority of mine. As a mentor, my mission has been to point out the right direction and create a supportive platform for my students and postdocs to perform and succeed.
PH.D. DEGREES GRANTED
Among the Sixty three graduate students, who have obtained their Ph.D. under Sau Lan Wu’s supervision, 10 of them did PhD in TASSO, 23 in ALEPH, 9 in the BaBar, and 21 in ATLAS Experiments respectively. We list here below their academic postdoc positions or non-academic positions after graduation. (This list includes a few co-advised students)
| 1) James Freeman | 1981 | Fermilab |
| 2) Timothy Barklow | 1983 | Stanford |
| 3) Eric Wicklund | 1984 | Caltech |
| 4) H. Venkataramania | 1985 | Yale |
| 5) David Strom | 1986 | McCormick Fellow U of Chicago |
| 6) Michael Cherney | 1987 | Berkeley |
| 7) Allen Caldwell | 1987 | Columbia |
| 8) Steven Ritz | 1988 | Columbia |
| 9) David Muller | 1989 | Stanford |
| 10) M. Takashima | 1989 | CERN Fellow |
| 11) Douglas Cowen | 1990 | Caltech |
| 12) John Hilgart | 1991 | CERN Fellow |
| 13) Joe Boudreau | 1991 | CERN Fellow |
| 14) Jim Wear | 1991 | U.C. Santa Cruz |
| 15) Yibin Pan | 1991 | Wisconsin |
| 16) David Cinabro | 1991 | Harvard |
| 17) Jolean Pater | 1992 | CERN Fellow |
| 18) Fred Weber | 1993 | CERN Fellow |
| 19) Michael Walsh | 1995 | Rutgers |
| 20) Leo Bellantoni | 1995 | Fermilab Lederman Fellow followed by Wilson Fellow |
| 21) Zhong Feng | 1995 | Johns Hopkins |
| 22) Yongsheng Gao | 1995 | Harvard |
| 23) Jane Nachtman | 1997 | Fermilab Wilson Fellow |
| 24) Jim Grahl | 1998 | Iowa State |
| 25) Peter Elmer | 1998 | Princeton |
| 26) Steve Armstrong | 1998 | CERN Fellow |
| 27) William Orejudos | 1998 | Berkeley |
| 28) Xidong Wu | 1999 | SBC Com. |
| 29) Owen Hayes | 1999 | Booz Allen Hamilton Consult. |
| 30) Tom Greening | 1999 | CERN Fellow |
| 31) Doug Ferguson | 2001 | Wisconsin |
| 32) Jason Nielsen | 2001 | Berkeley |
| 33) Eric Charles | 2002 | Berkeley |
| 34) P. McNamara | 2002 | Rutgers |
| 35) Steve Sekula | 2004 | MIT |
| 36) Ran Liu | 2004 | Berkeley Business School |
| 37) Jinwei Wu | 2004 | Harvard |
| 38) Zhitang Yu | 2005 | Clearshape Tech. |
| 39) Mousumi Datta | 2005 | Fermi National Lab |
| 40) Baosen Cheng | 2005 | Avestar-IP |
| 41) Attila Mihalyi | 2005 | Princeton Consulting |
| 42) Kyle Cranmer | 2005 | Godhaber Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers 2007 |
| 43) Karina Loureiro | 2006 | Ohio State |
| 44) Paul Kutter | 2006 | Citizen’s Insurance |
| 45) Alden Stradling | 2008 | University of Texas Arlington |
| 46) Yaquan Fang | 2008 | Wisconsin |
| 47) William Quayle | 2008 | US ATLAS Analysis Fellow |
| 48) Xin Chen | 2009 | Wisconsin |
| 49) Elizabeth Castaneda | 2011 | Foreign Academic Fellowship, Conacyt, Mexico |
| 50) Haifeng Li | 2012 | SUNY-Stony Brook |
| 51) German Carrillo | 2012 | CERN Fellow |
| 52) Alfredo Castenada | 2012 | U of Texas – A&M |
| 53) Haichen Wang | 2013 | Chamberlain Fellow at Berkeley |
| 54) Haoshuang Ji | 2014 | CONVIVA (real-time big data processing platform) |
| 55) Yao Ming | 2016 | Amazon |
| 56) Hongtao Yang | 2016 | Chamberlain Fellow at Berkeley |
| 57) Andrew Hard | 2016 | |
| 58) Fangzhou Zhang | 2017 | Ernst & Young |
| 59) Fuquan Wang | 2017 | Yelp |
| 60) Laser Kaplan | 2017 | Accenture |
| 61) Xiangyang Ju | 2018 | High Performance Computing Postdoctoral Scholar at Berkeley |
| 62) Alex Zeng WANG | 2023 | Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Santa Cruz. |
| 63) Jay Chan | 2023 | Postdoctoral Scholar at Berkeley (LBNL) |
ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF FORMER POST-DOCS AND FORMER GRADUATE STUDENTS
Our forty former postdocs and former graduate students are faculty members in major U.S. universities and worldwide. In addition, eighteen are staff members at major High Energy Physics laboratories. Also a number of our former Ph.D. entered the workforce of well-known industries, providing successfully the functionality of technology transfer.
FULL PROFESSORS (29)
| 1. Steven Ritz | Full Professor and former Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (University of California, Santa Cruz); NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal; APS Fellow; Sloan Foundation Fellow; Chairman of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) 2013; former member of HEPAP |
| 2. Robert Johnson | Full Professor, former Chairman of Physics Department and former Associate Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (University of California, Santa Cruz); APS Fellow |
| 3. Allen Caldwell | Former Full Professor (Columbia University); now Full Professor and Managing Director of Max-Planck-Institute for Physics, Munich (since April 2012); Head of the AWAKE experiment at CERN; former spokesman of ZEUS (1997-1998). Honorary Professor at Technical University of Munich |
| 4. Michael Cherney | Full Professor, former Director – Energy Technology Program (Creighton University) |
| 5. Vivek Sharma | Full Professor (University of California, San Diego); Sloan Foundation Fellow; APS Fellow |
| 6. David Strom | Full Professor (University of Oregon) |
| 7. Shan Jin | Full Professor (Nanjing University); Former Full Professor and Deputy Director, Exp. Phys. Div. (Inst. of HEP, Beijing); member of the Science Committee of IHEP; 100 Talents award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; National Science Award for Distinguished Young Scholars |
| 8. John Conway | Full Professor (University of California, Davis); APS Fellow |
| 9. John Harton | Full Professor (Colorado State University) |
| 10. Yuanning Gao | Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Full Professor and Chair of the School of Physics (Peking University); Former Full Professor and Director of the Center for HEP (Tsinghua Univ., Beijing); 100 Talents award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; National Science Award for Distinguished Young Scholars |
| 11. David Cinabro | Full Professor and Chair of Physics and Astronomy (Wayne State University) |
| 12. Hongbo Hu | Full Professor (Inst. of HEP, Beijing); standing member of the Science Committee of IHEP and former Deputy Director of the Astroparticle Physics Lab. (IHEP, Beijing); 100 Talents award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; National Science Award for Distinguished Young Scholars |
| 13. Douglas Cowen | Full Professor of Physics (Penn. State U.), NSF Career Award (1999-2003); Fulbright Scholar; Francis W. Sears Physics Prize, Associate Director of Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, Penn State (2013-2017) |
| 14. Haibo Li | Full Professor (Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing); 100 Talents award; National Science Award for Distinguished Young Scholars |
| 15. Joe Izen | Full Professor(University of Texas, Dallas); former co-spokesman of BES |
| 16. Haiping Peng | Full Professor (University of Science and Technology, China); 100 Talents award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences |
| 17. Michael Schmitt | Full Professor and Chairman of Physics Dept. (Northwestern University); former Assistant Professor at Harvard |
| 18. Joe Boudreau | Full Professor (University of Pittsburgh) |
| 19. Lianliang Ma | Full Professor (Shandong University, China) |
| 20. Stathes Paganis | Full Professor (National Taiwan University, Taiwan); former Associate Professor at the University of Sheffield, UK |
| 21. Yaquan Fang | Full Professor (Institute of HEP, Beijing); 100 Talent award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Chinese National Award for 1000 Youth Talents Plan |
| 22. Bruce Mellado | Full Professor (U. of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), Director of the Wits Institute for Collider Particle Physics, University of the Witwatersrand |
| 23. Jason Nielsen | Full Professor and Director, Institute for Particle Physics (University of California, Santa Cruz) |
| 24. Haifeng Li | Full Professor (Shandong University, China); Qi-Lu Young Scholar of Shandong University |
| 25. Yongsheng Gao | Full Professor (California State University at Fresno) |
| 26. Kyle Cranmer | Full Professor of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Director, American Family Data Science Institute. Former Full Professor (New York University); NSF Career Award (2009); Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers 2007; Goldhaber Fellow, BNL 2005-2007; Member of HEPAP (2016-2019). APS Fellow (2021) |
| 27. Isabel Pedraza | Full Professor (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico) |
| 28. Jane Nachtman | Full Professor (University of Iowa). Director of Undergraduate Studies. |
| 29. Stephen Sekula | Research Group Manager at SNOLAB and Professor at Queen’s University, Canada. Previously Full Professor & Chair of Physics Department (Southern Methodist University) |
ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS WITH TENURE (7) AND ASSISTANT PROFESSORS (4)
| 30. Trevor Vickey | Associate Professor (Reader in Particle Physics) (Sheffield University, UK) |
| 31. Yibin Pan | Associate Professor (University of Wisconsin) |
| 32. Gerald Rudolph | Associate Professor (Universität Innsbruck) |
| 33. Yingchun Zhu | Associate Professor (University of Science and Technology, China) |
| 34. Xin Chen | Associate Professor (Tsinghua University, Beijing) |
| 35. Luis Flores Castillo | Associate Professor (Chinese University of Hong Kong, China) |
| 36. Swagato Banerjee | Associate Professor (University of Louisville) |
| 37. Haichen Wang | Assistant Professor (U.C. Berkeley). Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation, 2021 |
| 38. Alfredo Castaneda | Assistant Professor (Universidad de Sonora, Mexico) |
| 39. Chen Zhou | Assistant Professor (Peking University) |
| 40. Hongtao Yang | Assistant Professor (University of Science and Technology, China) |
STAFF POSITIONS IN NATIONAL HIGH ENERGY LABS:
This table gives the list of Sau Lan Wu’s fourteen former postdocs and former graduate students who received staff positions in National and International High Energy Laboratories.
| FORMER POSTDOCS | |
| 1. Saul Gonzalez | Senior Advisor at the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate at NSF; Former Program Director of Experimental Elementary Particle Physics at NSF; Former Assistant Director for Physical Sciences at The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Former Program Manager for Proton Accelerator Physics, Physics Research Division of Office of High Energy Physics, DOE |
| 2. Pierre Lecomte | Senior Research Scientist, ETHZ (Switzerland) |
| 3. Tom C. Meyer | Staff Physicist, CERN |
| 4. John Walsh | Senior Researcher, INFN (Italy) |
| 5. Mathew Graham | Staff Physicist, SLAC |
| 6. Alden Stradling | HPC Cluster Engineer, Los Alamos National Laboratory |
| 7. Alessandro Di Mattia | Staff Physicist at INFN, Italy (Catania Section), Coordinator of Particle Physics Division. |
| 8. Wen Guan | Computational scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory |
| 9. Ximo Poveda | Spanish National Research Council (Spain) |
| FORMER GRADUATE STUDENTS | |
| 10. James Freeman | Scientist, Fermilab |
| 11. Tim Barklow | Senior Staff Physicist, SLAC |
| 12. DavidMuller | Staff Physicist, SLAC |
| 13. Eric Wicklund | Staff Scientist, Fermilab |
| 14. Leo Bellantoni | Scientist, Fermilab, (former Wilson and Lederman Fellow at Fermilab) |
| 15. Joleen Pater | Staff Physicist at the University of Manchester |
| 16. Eric Charles | Staff Physicist, SLAC |
| 17. Peter Elmer | Senior Research Physicist at Princeton University – Executive Director and Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) |
| 18. Xiangyang Ju | Computing System Engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
An interesting development is that high-energy physicists are entering the workforce of well-known industries. Having been well trained in the high technology environment of large international physics collaborations, members of our group are eminently suited to provide the functionality of technology transfer, always on the leading edge. For example, some of the former postdocs and former graduate students have held positions in industries are: (Note that this list may not be up to date)
| 1) Ian Scott – Chief Science Officer Deloitte Omnia – Artificial Intelligence. Former Partner Chief Data Scientist Deloitte Canada. Former VP customer Solutions at Lattice Engines. Former Chief Technology Officer at Angoss Software |
| 2) John Yamartino – Senior Director of Analytics and Machine Learning at Lam Research, Mountain View, California. Former Director of Analytics at Lam Research. Former Senior Data Scientist at IBM (Greater New York City Area). Former Engineering Program Manager at Applied Materials, Inc., Silicon Valley |
| 3) Makoto Takashima – Consultant at Cinctive Capital, New York |
| 4) Damon Fasching – Senior Director, Auto Engineering at Gracenote, California |
| 5) Zhong Feng – Lead System Engineer at Raytheon for NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. |
| 6) John Hilgart – Senior Network Security Engineer at BASF. Former Senior Internet Infrastructure Architect at BASF. Former eCommerce Infrastructure Architect |
| 7) Fred Weber – Senior Research Scientist at A2Z Development Center Inc A2Z Development Center Inc Grinnell College Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
Former Senior Research Scientist, Columbia University Earth Institute (subject: Spoken Language Technology for Development: Communication as Empowerment). Former Senior Research Scientist at ScanSoft, Inc. (Boston) for speech recognition |
| 8) Jim Wear – Senior Physicist at GE Medical Systems, Madison, Wisconsin |
| 9) Michael Walsh – Consultant at Superior Consulting Company Inc. |
| 10) Xidong Wu – Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Workday, Pleasanton, CA. Former Lead Member of Technical Staff in Telecommunications at AT&T (San Francisco Bay Area). Former Software Engineer at SBC Communications |
| 11) Owen Hayes – Director, Enterprise Project Management Office, CIT, Greater NY City area. Former Founder and Partner of Jorgeson Trading, former Director of Strategy & Technology at Thomson Reuters, Former Business Technology Director at Elsevier (Greater Philadelphia Area). Former Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton Consulting Firm |
| 12) Thomas Greening – Distinguished Engineer and Senior Scientist at Apple (San Francisco Bay Area). Former Principal Scientist at Honeywell. Recipient of Technical Achievement Award (2003) and Outstanding Engineer of the Year Award (2002) |
| 13) Stephen Armstrong – Senior Director – Corporate Strategy Implementation at Lonza (Basel, Switzerland). Former Assistant Vice President, SGS Group management Ltd, Switzerland |
| 14) Zhitang Yu – Senior Software Development Engineer at Mentor Graphics (San Francisco Bay Area). Former Research and Development Engineer at ClearShape Technologies |
| 15) Mousumi Datta – Model Risk Analyst, Quantitative Risk Management at The Options Clearing Corporation, Chicago |
| 16) Baosen Cheng – Software Engineer at Comcast Silicon Valley (Plaxo) (San Francisco Bay Area). Former Software Engineer at Avestar-IP |
| 17) Attila Mihalyi – Director at Princeton Consultants, former Senior Engineering Specialist at Princeton Consultants (Greater New York City Area). Former Senior Associate/Consultant at Princeton Consultants |
| 18) Jinwei Wu – Strategist at Pine River Capital Management (Greater New York City Area). Former Strategist at Goldman Sachs (Greater New York City Area) |
| 19) William Orejudos – Senior Product Architect at WillowTree, Charlottesville, Virginia. Former Senior Member, Energy and Environmental Services, SRA International (Charlottesville, Virginia Area) |
| 20) Paul Kutter – Director of Forecasting and Research at Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. Former Actuarial Analyst at Citizens Property Insurance (Tallahassee, Florida) |
| 21) Neng Xu – Chief Technology Officer at YKLM Auctions, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada |
| 22) Sanjay Padhi – Executive Vice President and Chief Technologist at Tag.bio, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Formerly Global Scientific Computing Principal at Amazon Web Services |
| 23) André Anjos – Research Scientist at IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland. Head of the Biosignal Processing Group |
| 24) Tapas Sarangi – Software Engineer at Entegral Software Development, Madison, Wisconsin |
| 25) Ruslan Asfandiyarov – Managing Director & Senior Consultant at DeepTechConsult, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland |
| 26) Lashkar Kashif – Senior Director and Head of Data Science at Cvent |
| 27) German Carrillo Montoya : Head of Machine Learning & Data Science at Fortum |
| 28) Haoshuang Ji – Senior Software engineer at Conviva |
| 29) Yao Ming – Software Development Engineer at Amazon corporate LLC |
| 30) Andrew Hard – Software engineer at Google |
| 31) Fuquan Wang – Software engineer at Facebook, formerly at Yelp |
| 32) Fangzhou Zhang – Senior Consultant at Ernst & Young |
| 33) Laser Kaplan – Senior Data Scientist/Software Engineer in LiveRamp |