Interactions.

Student Awards and Recent Graduates

Our students work very hard and accomplish great things to complete their degrees, so one of the highlights of the year is celebrating their graduation.

Participants consisting of physics faculty and students at the department’s commencement celebration on May 17, 2021. Graduating students are seated in the front row, from left to right: Jiawei Wang, Xi Chen (MS), Muhammad Kilinc, Bilal Barut, Hannah Seppala (BS,) and Lauren Kim (BS). 

Nathaniel J. Fuller.

Nathaniel J. Fuller won a DoD SMART Fellowship and completed his PhD in physics with a specialization in theoretical nonlinear dynamics under the supervision of Prof. Surajit Sen in May 2021. Nathaniel is now on the staff of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Panama City, Florida.

Xiucheng Wei.

Xiucheng Wei received a Best Symposium Oral Presentation Award, for his talk entitled “Realization of BaZrS3 Chalcogenide Perovskite Thin Films for Optoelectronics” at the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting 2021. Xiucheng has had a productive research at UB, publishing eight papers in prestigious journals, including two first-author papers in Nano Energy and one co-authored paper in Nature Electronics. He defended his PhD dissertation in August 2021, and is now an Application Development Engineer at KLA Corporation, a major manufacturer of semiconductor equipment. 

Graduate student Garvita Argawal.

Graduate student Garvita Argawal, a recipient of the Om and Saraswati Bahethi Foundation PhD Scholarship, is currently located at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, to conduct research in experimental high-energy physics at the Large Hadron Collider. Shown here is Garvita in front of the CMS detector. Garvita is a member of CMS tracker operation group, where she works together with other UB HEP students and postdocs. In parallel, she conducts searches for new particles postulated by theories beyond the standard model, which predict heavy boson resonances decaying to top quarks pairs.

Graduate Student Awards

Gasparini Thesis Prize (2021)

  • Dasharath Adhikari
  • Bilal Tariq

John Ho & Martha Leung Scholarship (2021)

  • Sangit Baskota
  • Ahmed Elshahawy
  • Sharmistha Khan
  • Chiran Wijesundara Mudiyanselage

Om and Saraswati Bahethi Foundation Scholarship (2020-2021)

PhD Scholarships

  • Garvita Agarwal
  • Taranpreet Kaur
  • Chenghao Shen

MS Scholarships

  • Xi Chen

Om and Saraswati Bahethi Foundation Scholarship (2021-2022)

PhD Scholarships

  • Ibraheem Alshareedah
  • Rance Solomon
  • Jiawei Wang
  • Ishiaka Mansaray

MS Scholarships

  • Jinrui Bai
  • Cameron Ballacchino

Outstanding Teaching Assistants (2020-2021)

  • Sushruth Muralidharan
  • Peter Young

Physics Graduate Student Memorial Fellowship (McCombe Fellowship) (2020-2021)

  • Haider Abbas
  • Mohamed Fawzy Aly
  • Nitin Kumar
  • Priyanka Vadnere
  • Jiawei Wang
  • Guangpeng Xu

Silvestro Scholarship (2020-2021)

  • Garvita Agarwal
  • Arinjoy Bhattacharya
  • Omar Elsherif
  • Lauren Hay
  • Chang Huai
  • Arman Najafi
  • Sam Powers
  • Akansha Sharma
  • Rance Solomon
  • Zhao Tang
  • Jiawei Wang
  • Xicheng Wei

Saudi Fellowship

  • Amani Almutairi

Undergraduate Awards (2020-2021)

CAS College Ambassadors

  • Paul Dewan
  • Austin Marga

Om and Saraswati Bahethi Foundation Scholarship

  • Lauren Kim
  • Paul Pullara
  • Hannah Seppala
  • Cameron Watt

Outstanding Seniors

  • Hannah Seppala
  • Cameron Watt

Sekula Scholarship

  • Eric Cicero
  • Paul Dewan
  • Trevor Higgins
  • Austin Marga
  • Luke Meiler
  • Kevin Smith

2021-2022 Sigma Pi Sigma Inductees

  • Shahed Hanif
  • Krish Patel
  • Trey Wojnar

Recent Graduates

Fall 2019

Physics PhD

  • Ashley Marie Parker
    Advisor: Salvatore Rappoccio
    Thesis Title: “Differential Jet Production Cross Section Measurement in Z + Jet events from Proton – Proton Collisions at = 13 TeV using the CMS detector at LHC”

Physics Master's (MS)

  • Benjamin Cammett

Physics Bachelor’s (BS)

  • Alex Detlef
  • Dylan Walker

Spring 2020

Physics PhD

  • Nargess Arabchigavkani
     Advisor: Jonathan Bird
    Thesis Title: “Magnetic Proximity Effects in Hybrid Graphene/Ferromagnetic System”
  • Roberto Mondini
    Advisor: Ciaran Williams
    Thesis Title: "Predictions for the decay of the Higgs boson to bottom quarks to third order in QCD"
  • Michael Morse
    Advisor: William Kinney
    Thesis Title: “Constant-Roll Inflation, Phantom Dark Energy, & Bell Violation in the CMB”
  • Jungryeol Seo
    Advisor: John Cerne
    Thesis Title: “Symmetry Breaking In Cuprate High TC Superconductor: Doping, Energy, and Temperature Dependence”
  • Weiyi Xia
    Advisor: Peihong Zhang
    Thesis Title: “Large-scale GW Quasiparticle Calculations for 3D and 2D Materials: Methodology Development and Applications”

Physics Master's (MS)

  • W. Jesse Barber
  • Zekun Fang
  • Akash Patel
  • Akansha Sharma
  • Guangpeng Xu
  • Peter Young

Physics Bachelor’s (BS)

  • Nicolas Bartelo
  • Alexander Bivolcic
  • Anthony Cabanillas
  • James Carter
  • Alex Davie
  • Riley Dominianni
  • Benjamin Leinweber
  • Benjamin Mannix
  • Christian Neureuter
  • Eric Niblock
  • Shashank Paithanker
  • Zayne Sember
  • Alexis Serwon

Spring 2020

Physics PhD

  • Jeremy Baron
    Advisor: Doreen Wackeroth
    Thesis Title: “Groomed Event Shapes”

Fall 2020

Physics PhD

  • Alireza Jalouli
    Advisor:     Hao Zeng
    Thesis Title: “Synthesis and Optical Characterization of Two Dimensional Transition Metal Dichalcogenide (TMD) alloys”
  • Steven Tarasek
     Advisor: Tim Thomay
    Thesis Title: “Temporal Dynamics of Magnetically Doped Low Dimensional Semiconductor Structures”

Physics Bachelor’s (BS)

  • Bailey Bussiere
  • Simrit Singh
  • Elisabeth Varnazishvili

Spring 2021

Physics PhD

  • Dasharath Adhikari
     Advisor: Sambandamurthy Ganapathy
    Thesis Title:  "Charge Dynamics across Phase Transition in Strongly Correlated Electron Systems"
  • Bilal Barut
     Advisor: Jonathan Bird
    Thesis Title: "Asymmetrically Engineered Nanoscale Transistors for On-Demand Sourcing of Terahertz Plasmons"
  • Nathaniel Fuller
    Advisor:     Surajit Sen
    Thesis Title: “Studies of nonlinear waves and localization in discrete systems"
  • Muhammed Kilinc
    Advisor:     Tim Thomay
    Thesis Title: “Nonlinear Optical Properties and Fiber-Laser-Based Applications of Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Monolayers”
  • Wei Chen LinAdvisor:
     William Kinney
    Thesis Title: “The Swampland Conjectures and Early Universe Theories Phenomenology”
  • Gabriel Lopez-Candales
    Advisor: Peihong Zhang
    Thesis Title: “Electronic Structure of Transition Metal Oxy-Chalcogenides for Energy Applications"
  • Fan Sun
    Advisor: Hao Zeng
    Thesis Title: “Anomalous Hall effect in FePt nanoparticle thin films”

Physics Master’s (MS)

  • Ibraheem Alshareedah
  • Xi Chen
  • Taranpreet Kaur
  •  Bolong Wei

Physics Bachelor’s (BS)

  • Kimberly Crossen
  • Simon Danilov
  • Louis Estrella
  • Mallory Karlik
  • Jeremy Kazimer
  • Lauren Kim
  • Hunter Lavalley
  • Andrew Sipper
  • William Stephenson
  • Cynthia Vincens
  • Cameron Watt
  • Chenhao Zou

Summer 2021

Physics PhD

  • Arman Najafi
    Advisor: Athos Petrou
    Thesis Title: “Magneto-Optical studies of Group II-VI Diluted Magnetic Semiconductor Nanoplatelets”
  • Chenghao Shen
    Advisor: Igor Zutic
    Thesis Title: “Normal-state and Superconducting transport in spin-orbit-coupled systems”
  • Bilal Tariq
    Advisor: Xuedong Hu
    Thesis Title: “Spin Qubit Based on Silicon Quantum Dots”
  • Xiucheng Wei
    Advisor: Hao Zeng
    Thesis Title: “Spin Qubit Based on Silicon Quantum Dots”
  • Michael Zucker
    Advisor: Arnd Pralle
    Thesis Title: “Investigations of Plasma Membrane Phase Separation and Mechanosensitive Ion Channel Piezo1 Through Fluorescence Microscopy Methods”

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