Georgia Tech is excited to host the following speakers and panelists during our 2016 APS CUWiP:
Keynote Speaker: Ginger Kerrick
Ginger Kerrick, as a child, dreamed of growing up to be either a basketball player or an astronaut. When neither dream came to fruition, Ms. Kerrick developed a fresh perspective – best summed up by the phrase “It just wasn’t meant to be” – and is today part of NASA, serving in the Mission Control Center at the NASA Johnson Space Center as a Flight Director who has, to date, supported 13 International Space Station and five joint shuttle missions. It was there that Ms. Kerrick, a few years earlier, became the first non-astronaut Capsule Communicator (CapCom), the Flight Control position that relays information from Mission Control to an astronaut crew.
Plenary Speakers
| Dr. Meg Urry is an American astrophysicist, currently the President of the American Astronomical Society, formerly on the Hubble space telescope faculty and was chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University 2007-2013. She is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys but for her work addressing sexism and gender equity in astronomy, and science and academia more generally.(Source: Wikipedia) |
 Dr. Meg Urry, Israel Munson Professor of Physics & Astronomy, Director Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics |
 Dr. Deborah Jin, CU-Boulder Adjoint professor of Physics, photographed in one of the lobbies of the JILA facility on the CU-Boulder campus. (Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado) |
Dr. Deborah Jin is a physicist and fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Professor Adjunct, Department of Physics at the University of Colorado; and a fellow of the JILA, a NIST joint laboratory with the University of Colorado. She is considered a pioneer in polar molecular quantum chemistry. Dr. Jin did her Ph.D. work on heavy fermion superconductors. After receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Jin interests shifted focus to the new ultracold gases being developed in atomic physics. As a postdoctoral scientist with NIST, she worked on some of the first experimental studies of Bose-Einstein condensates in ultracold gases of atoms. Dr. Jin is known for her creation of the first ultracold gas of fermions and the realization of a superfluid of paired fermions. (Source: Wikipedia) |
| Sue Payne recently retired from Exxon Mobil Corporation after a 37- year career in global oil and gas exploration, development and production. After starting her career as a geophysicist in Mobil’s technology center in Dallas Texas, she served in many diverse professional and management roles. As an executive, she held positions in Mobil Oil as an advisor in Mobil’s headquarters in New York and Fairfax, as South American Business Development Manager and as Vice President of US Onshore Exploration and Production. Following the merger of Exxon and Mobil in 2000, she served as Geoscience Manager for ExxonMobil Production, as US Exploration Manager, as Global Exploration Planning Manager and finally as Manager of Global Geoscience. From 2011 to 2013, Sue was the Chief Operating Officer for the National Math and Science Initiative, a national non-profit focused on improving the math and science educational performance in US schools. (Source: http://www.uh.edu/class/ws/_docs/Biographies.pdf) |
 Susan Payne, former Planning Manager for ExxonMobil Exploration Company. |
 Dr. Connie Roth, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Emory University working on experimental soft condensed matter research. |
Dr. Connie Roth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Emory University. Connie received her B.Sc. in Physics at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada), and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Polymer Physics at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada). She also completed post-doctoral positions at Simon Fraser University (British-Columbia, Canada) and Northwestern University (Chicago, IL). Connie has been a faculty member at Emory since 2007. Connie’s research falls under the area of Experimental Soft Condensed Matter Physics. Her research interests include polymer materials, glass transition, physical aging, photophysics, miscibility and phase separation; effects of nanoconfinement, surfaces and interfaces, external stresses, electric fields, and nanoparticles. (Source: Personal webpage) |
| Dr. Jane Rigby is a civil servant Astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Rigby serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for Operations for the James Webb Space Telescope. She is a researcher who investigates how galaxies and black holes evolve and is a public speaker on astronomy, science and diversity who has spoken at the Library of Congress, TEDx and the Huntington Library. She is also a blogger at AstroBetter. (Source: http://www.janerigby.net/) |
 Dr. Jane Rigby serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for Operations for the James Webb Space Telescope. |
“Outside of Academia: What can I do with my physics Degree?” Panelists
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Dr. Zelda Gills is a physicist working in the aerospace and defense industry as a technical project manager at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. Dr. Gills’ career at Lockheed began with engineering, prototyping and testing solutions for airborne communications, radar and defensive systems. She currently leverages expertise in systems engineering and avionics to conceptualize and mature solutions for mission system modification contracts valued at over $100 million each and aircraft recapitalization programs valued at over $1.5 billion long term. Over the course of her career, she has led multisite/ multidisciplinary technical teams in a variety of industries including optics/photonics, telecommunications, electronics and avionics. (Source: http://www.umcuwip.org/drupal/speakers) |
| Dr. Rachel Near spent nine years at the Georgia Institute of Technology, during which time she received BS degrees in both Physics and Chemistry, followed by a PhD in Physical Chemistry. Her doctoral research focused on the optical properties of plasmonic nanoparticles, optimizing their design for applications in spectroscopy, solar energy, catalysis, cancer therapy and biodiagnostics. After concluding her doctoral program, Rachel became a Scientific Advisor at Meunier Carlin & Curfman LLC, an Intellectual Property law firm. As a Scientific Advisor, Rachel has gained patent prosecution and opinion experience in agricultural chemicals, batteries, catalysts, oil and gas technology, optical materials, paints and coatings, polymer dispersions, and pulp and paper technology. |  |
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Leanne West is a Principal Research Scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the Chief Engineer of Pediatric Technologies for Georgia Tech. She serves as the technical liaison between Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Ms. West works closely with Children’s to understand and identify problems that need a solution to allow Children’s to take better care of their patients. She also runs a funding program as a part of the relationship with Children’s called “Quick Wins,” which funds solutions to problems that are clinician-driven and that can be wholly solved in 18 months or less.Ms. West serves on the executive management team of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and on the health team within Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). She has served as the twice-elected Chair of the Georgia Tech Executive Board. She was recognized by Georgia Trend magazine as one of Georgia’s “40 Under 40” in 2004; she was selected for Leadership Georgia in 2008; she was a member of the team awarded the international Optical Society 2012 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award; she received Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Achievement in Research Enterprise Enhancement Award in 2014, and she was Women in Technology’s Woman of the year in 2014. She also started her own company, Intelligent Access, to take her invention of a wireless personal captioning system to market. |
| Dr. Sarah Sharpe is a senior associate in the biomechanics practice at Exponent, an engineering and scientific consulting firm. Her areas of expertise include occupant kinematics and injury mechanics in automotive, recreational, law enforcement, and workplace incidents; advanced driver assistance systems; neural control of movement; and the study of human gait including slip, trip and fall events.Prior to joining Exponent, Sarah earned her PhD in Bioengineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and served as a graduate research assistant in the Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab. Her research involved analysis and integration of the physics of complex substrates during animal movement to understand locomotion neuromechanics on a variety of terrains. Sarah has additionally conducted research in the Robotics and Autonomous Controls Laboratory at the University of Central Florida and in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. |  |
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Katherine Khalilah Sabree is a former STT (Scientific Tools and Techniques) Student, and 1993 Graduate of Stone Mountain High School. After graduating from Spelman College ’97 in Dual Degree Engineering and The Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech) in Material Science in ’01, Katherine went on to earn her M.Ed in Science Education from Georgia State University. She has traveled to 18 countries and has earned the distinguished title Hajjah in 2006. She has one son and loves teaching Physical, Earth, and Material Science at Fernbank Science Center. |
“Research, Internships and Study Abroads, Oh, My!” Panelists
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Dr. Jennifer Curtis is an Associate Professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology. Jennifer received her B.A. in Physics at Columbia University (New York, NY) in 1997, and her PhD in Physics at the University of Chicago in 2002. There her research focused on soft matter physics and optical manipulation. She helped pioneer the development of holographic optical tweezers, a powerful method to generate dynamic optical traps and optical vortices in three dimensions. During her postdoctoral research at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, Jennifer began to study the role of physics in biological systems, particularly at the cell and tissue level. During that time she was an Alexander Humboldt Fellow and eventually an independent group leader before she became a faculty member at Georgia Tech in 2007. In 2010 she received an NSF CAREER Award and in 2014 she became an Editorial Board Member of the Biophysical Journal. Her active research interests fall in the area of Physics of Living Systems / Biological Physics, and include cell adhesion and motility, phagocytosis, the polymer generating molecular machine hyaluronan synthase, and how the large carbohydrate polymer hyaluronan organizes tissues and mediate cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions. In her free time, she enjoys running, reading, yoga, learning the ukulele, and spending time with her husband and two children, a nine-year old boy and a 1 year old girl. |
| Claire Yanyan Ji is currently a physics PhD student at Georgia Tech. Her thesis is devoted to aid in the understanding of mechanisms that initiate cardiac arrhythmia and to develop new state-of-the-art defibrillation methods using concepts from nonlinear dynamics and chaos that allow arrhythmia termination with low energy shocks. Claire has also served as a visiting researcher at FDA working on verifying and validating computer models for the study of cardiac fibrillation and defibrillation and has completed an internship at Boston Scientific developing ablation catheter models. |  |
