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 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 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, 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”