CER/OASIS Reception
April 11, 2023 | Green Table Room, Price Center
4:00 p.m. Mingle | 4:30 p.m. Faculty Panel + Q&A
About:
CER faculty and researchers will connect with first year students in the UCSD OASIS program, which seeks to support and offer research experiences to first generation college students and students from underserved populations. CER faculty and researchers will answer questions about research in a panel format.
Light food and drinks will be served.
Join us for lab tours on April 19. Sign up here! Learn more about CER labs.
Students interested in becoming more involved in research with CER will have the opportunity to partner with a faculty member/researcher to complete an internship.
CER Panel Participants:
Farhat Beg
Farhat Beg is a Professor of Engineering Physics at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from Imperial College London. He joined University of California San Diego as a faculty in 2003. His expertise is in the field of inertial and magneto inertial fusion, laser plasma interaction, pulsed power driven X- and Z-pinches, and neutron sources. He has published over 240 papers in refereed journals, including Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Communications and Physical Review Letters, with total citations exceeding 9000 with and H-index of 49, according to the ISI Web of Knowledge. He is the fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He been a winner of the Department of Junior Faculty Award (2005) and IEEE Early Career Award (2008). He has served twice as the Chair of the High-Energy Density Science Association (HEDSA) in 2009/2010 and in 2017/2018. The HEDSA is an association of scientists from academia that promote High-Energy Density Laboratory Plasma in universities and small businesses, as well as in national laboratories. He also served as the Chair of the National Ignition Facility User Group from 2017-2019. Dr. Beg served as the Director of CER from 2015 to 2019.
Simon Bott-Suzuki
Dr. Bott-Suzuki investigates plasmas generated using high current capacitor-driven devices through both experimental and computational studies. The high plasma densities and magnetic fields created conditions of interest in many areas of high energy density physics, which includes the drive towards Inertial Confinement Fusion and subsequent fusion power generation. Such plasmas also have interesting hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic flow properties and can be used to study, for example, shock formation in radiatively cooled flows, and the propagation of plasma jets relevant to astrophysical objects. Dr. Bott-Suzuki carries out his research as part of both national and international collaborations, as well as developing new devices and experimental approaches on the UC San Diego campus. He is particularly interested in pursuing ways in which pulsed power plasmas and devices can be utilized to further understand broader plasma and physics issues. Full Bio.
Mathieu Bailly-Grandvaux
Mathieu Bailly-Grandvaux received his Ph.D. degree in 2017 from the University of Bordeaux, France, specializing in Astrophysics, Plasma, and Particles. Mathieu received an award in 2018 from the University of Osaka, Japan, for his Ph.D. work on the characterization of laser-driven strong magnetic fields and high discharge currents and their applications to charged particle transport. He joined the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 2017; he is currently an Assistant Project Scientist with the Center for Energy Research.
His research focuses on the study of energy transport and particle acceleration in laser-driven plasmas through both experiments and simulations, with a particular interest in magnetized environments and applications in Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and laboratory astrophysics. This work encompasses several aspects of laser-matter interaction and plasma physics in the High-Energy-Density (HED) regime, including ion acceleration from micro-structured targets, relativistic electron transport in shocked and/or magnetized plasmas, proton heating and transport in Warm Dense Matter (WDM), and heat transport and confinement properties of magnetized hot dense plasmas.
As sole principal investigator, his research on magnetized implosions at the OMEGA and National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser facilities has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and he is co-leading projects funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration and the University of California Office of the President. His published peer-reviewed works have been cited more than 1000 times (h-index of 13).
Carlos Coimbra
Professor Coimbra explores the intersection between experimental, theoretical and fieldwork methods to analyze and develop new technologies to harvest solar power in its diverse forms (direct, wind, hydropotential, etc). His research group uses a network of solar observatories distributed throughout several University of California campuses to harvest valuable ground data to be used in forecasting simulations with time horizons varying from seconds to multiple days. He is particularly interested in the development of highly nonlinear, evolutionary stochastic models for chaotic processes, and linking this knowledge to the development and active control of receiver-to-storage solar and wind systems.
Mike Ferry
Mike is the Director of Energy Storage and Systems at UC San Diego, overseeing campus research on the development and deployment of advanced energy storage technologies and the integration of renewable generation, including technical and commercial demonstration projects to improve the performance of renewable energy systems and microgrid operations, cost-benefit and market analysis, and the promotion of multi-disciplinary frameworks to enable large-scale storage and renewable energy adoption. His energy research also involves electric transportation including EV charging infrastructure, vehicle-grid integration (VGI), and second-life EV battery research. Mike holds a Master of Science degree from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.
Chris Holland
Dr. Christopher Holland’s work focuses on understanding the fundamental dynamics of plasma turbulence in magnetically confined systems. The goal of his work is to help develop and improve predictive models of the turbulence, and transport of particles, energy, and momentum it drives, to aid in the realization of fusion energy as an economically viable commercial energy source. As part of this work, Dr. Holland and his collaborators lead validation studies of plasma turbulence using both massively parallel gyrokinetic codes and reduced gyrofluid models, focusing most recently on development of synthetic fluctuation diagnostics and incorporating them into new validation metrics. These studies are performed in close collaboration with the DIII-D experimental team at General Atomics, as well as other US and international fusion experiments, and the Controlled Shear Decorrelation Experiment (CSDX) at UCSD. Complementing these tokamak validation studies are efforts aimed at developing new theoretical models for understanding the coupling between small-scale drift-wave turbulence and macroscopic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities in magnetically confined plasmas. Full bio.
Maria Pia Valdivia Leiva
Dr. Maria Pia Valdivia Leiva is an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), Center for Energy Research and a Visiting Associate Researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University. She has led the development of advanced Phase-Contrast X-ray imaging diagnostics for High Energy Density Laboratory Plasmas experiments in the high-intensity laser and pulsed-power environments since 2013.
Dr. Valdivia participates in national and international collaborations leading the development of new x-ray phase-contrast imaging techniques to obtain electron density, small-angle scatter, and mixing information through x-ray phase, transmission, and dark-field mapping. She develops new x-ray diagnostic devices and techniques at the UC San Diego campus and has fielded Talbot-Lau X-ray Deflectometry (TXD) diagnostics on laser and facilities such as: Omega EP, MTW, LULI2000, ECLIPSE, SACLA, and LCLS-MEC, where she has studied plasma dynamics in experimental campaigns related to High Energy Laboratory Astrophysics and Inertial Confinement Fusion research.
Dr. Valdivia earned her PhD in Exact sciences at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in 2011. She is part of the P3 (Pulsed Plasma Physics) group at UCSD, led by Dr. Simon Bott-Suzuki. Her current research interests include high-intensity laser-matter interactions, dense Z-pinches, alternative x-ray radiation sources for HEDLP applications, and the development of advanced diagnostics for High Temperature Plasmas. She also participates in Physics Education Research projects as well as Science Communication and Outreach programs focused on the advancement and inclusion of girls, women, gender-diverse, and other underrepresented groups in STEM.
Yuanyuan Shi
Dr. Shi is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UCSD. She is also affiliated with the Center for Machine Intelligence, Computing & Security and the Center for Energy Research. Her research interests broadly lie in machine learning, dynamical systems and control, and sustainability. Her lab focuses on various aspects of creating intelligent systems, with an emphasis on principled learning and control algorithms for sustainable energy and power systems. Before joining UCSD, she was a postdoc fellow in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at Caltech from 2020-2021, working with Adam Wierman and Anima Anandkumar. She obtained my Ph.D. from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Washington, advised by Baosen Zhang.
