Meet the Cohort
2025 Participants
Abby Bault
Abby is a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab where she studies observational cosmology with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Her main focus is on improving instrumentation for current and future spectroscopic surveys. Outside of the lab, her hobbies include watching Detroit sports, especially hockey, crocheting, playing video games, and being outside in nature.
Madeline Bernstein
Madeline is a PhD candidate in the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, where she’s using atom interferometry to make a precision measurement of the fine-structure constant. She is broadly interested in using atomic systems to search for new physics. When not trapped in her basement lab, Madeline enjoys being outside, making art, and going to concerts.
Charlotte Devitre
Charlotte was a postdoctoral scholar in Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, where she developed near-real time geochemical tools to determine where magmas are stored prior to volcanic eruptions in collaboration with the USGS Hawaiian volcano observatory. She is broadly interested in volcanoes and their interactions with humans and the environment. Outside work, Charlotte enjoys being in Nature, floating in the Ocean, photography and cooking.
Elizabeth J. Dresselhaus
Elizabeth is a postdoctoral researcher studying emergent phenomena in knitted fabrics with physics and math. In her free time, she knits for fun, swims, hikes and plays violin.
Maude Gull
Maude is a finishing graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley. She studies metal-poor massive stars in nearby galaxies, which are local analogs for the first stars in the early universe. Outside of research she enjoys photography, cinema and basketball.
Danielle Hodgkinson
Danielle is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley and a member of the ALPHA Collaboration at CERN. Her research focuses on studying the fundamental properties of trapped antihydrogen. In particular, her research focuses on studying the nonlinear dynamics of magnetically trapped atoms.
Miao Hu
Miao is a postdoctoral researcher in the physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She works on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC to investigate the fundamental building blocks of the universe and to unravel new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Marilena Lykiardopoulou
Marilena is a postdoctoral scholar at Berkeley Lab. Her research focuses on Super Heavy Elements and more specifically in the development of hardware towards new element discoveries and studies of exotic decays in the heaviest of elements. Outside of work Marilena enjoys baking bread and travelling.
Dimitra Anastasia Pefkou
Dimitra is a postdoctoral associate at UC Berkeley and an affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She works on mapping out the structure of the proton and other hadrons using the framework of Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics.
Mara H. Reed
Mara is a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. She studies the reasons why geysers start and stop erupting and is more broadly interested in designing natural resource monitoring networks. In her free time, she is most likely to be found exploring caves and karst.
Divya Singh
Divya is a postdoctoral fellow at the N3AS centre in UC, Berkeley. Her research focusses on constraining dark matter with gravitational-wave observations of merging black holes and neutron stars with present and future gravitational wave observatories.
Mercedes Vasquez
Mercedes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. She studies the mechanisms of thermal transport under the conditions found in deep planetary interiors. She is particularly interested in understanding how the structure of Earth’s core evolved over time. Outside of research, she enjoys playing soccer and reading a good book next to a sunny window with her cat, Fiona, nearby.
Anne Voigtländer
Anne is postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She explores controls of morphological changes from crystal interfaces to mountain ranges using geophysics, geochemistry, geology and Human Intelligence. Anne has a high tendency to be active – out and about- unless she is sleeping in.
Erika Ye
Erika is a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her research involves developing algorithms for approximate numerical simulation of physical systems, with an emphasis on plasma dynamics and turbulence. Her hobbies include indoor bouldering and watching plants grow.
Qian Yu
Qian is a graduate student in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on trapped electrons and trapped ions for quantum information processing.
Jessie Zhang
Jessie is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley.
