Speakers

Janelle is a change agent in human resources and definitive leader in diversity and inclusion. Her 25 years of combined experience spans the private, federal and local government sectors bringing innovative approaches to leading organizational and cultural change.

She designed, developed and led the DEIA strategy in response to Executive Order 14035, a federal government-wide initiative to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA), and is regarded by the Department of Labor (DOL) as a leading voice, having served as the DEIA officer for the DOL Employment and Training Administration (ETA). She played a key role in launching the DOL Divine 9 Affinity Group advocating and creating opportunities for the advancement of historically underserved communities with an emphasis on HBCUs to build a pipeline of talent from HBCUs to DOL. In response to Executive Order 13985/14091, she served on DOL Equity Committees to affirmatively advance equity, civil rights, racial justice and equal opportunity in the way the agency serves the American people.

Her experience also includes the Department of Transportation, where she served 12 years in the Office of the Secretary leading the human capital strategy, strategic workforce planning, diversity and inclusion, and organizational effectiveness strategies.

From 2017 to 2022, Locascio served as vice president for research at the University of Maryland College Park and University of Maryland Baltimore. She also served as a professor in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering with a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine. Before joining the university, she was at NIST for 31 years, rising from a research biomedical engineer to leading the agency’s Material Measurement Laboratory.

Locascio is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Locascio was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Professor Phillips received his B.S. in 1970 from Juniata College and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow and Honorary Member of the Optical Society of America and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Pollard-Larkin is a trailblazer. She is the first Black woman faculty member in MD Anderson’s Radiation Physics department. She has clinical, administrative and educational responsibilities. She also conducts clinical research, mentors faculty, and teaches medical physics to residents and graduate students. In her clinical faculty leadership role, she manages the treatment and quality assurance for the center’s lung radiotherapy patients. Her primary research interests include Flash ultra-high dose radiotherapy, pacemaker radiotherapy dose measurements and improving the efficacy of motion management in thoracic treatments and radiobiology. Notably, beyond her role at MD Anderson Cancer center treating patients with radiotherapy, Julianne is also a Fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and is their Chair over their Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee.

She received her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fl and then earned her PhD in Biomedical Physics at UCLA. After receiving her PhD at UCLA, Julianne was accepted into the medical physics residency program at MD Anderson in Houston, Tx. Following her residency, Julianne was hired by MD Anderson as faculty.

A defining characteristic about Julianne is that she is a firm believer in outreach and increasing the number of women and underrepresented populations in science. Ensuring that more underrepresented students and women follow in her footsteps is Julianne’s passion. To that end, she is one of the featured physicists in the American Institute of Physics’ “We Are Scientists” media campaign.

He has chaired the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland since 2016, and before that served as co-Director of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaborative center formed by UMD, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences. Steve Rolston received his B.S. from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 2016-17, Rolston served as Chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics.

Rolston is a Fellow of UMD’s Quantum Technology Center, the JQI, the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the recipient of the Arthur S. Flemming Award, the Sigma Xi Young Scientist Award, the U.S. Dept. of Commerce Silver Medal, and UMD’s Kirwan Undergraduate Education Award.

He is known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory in addition to his work in Public Policy.

Dr. Rockward has a unique combination of leadership from academic, professional, and community experiences. Prior to his transition to Morgan State, he served 7 years as the Chair of the Department of Physics & Dual Degree Engineering Program (Physics & DDEP) and 20 years as the Research Director of the Materials and Optics Research & Engineering (MORE) Laboratory at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia.  Among his professional leadership experiences, he is the immediate Past President of both the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) and the Sigma Pi Sigma Physics Honor Society (SPS).  Also, he has served a combination of 29 years as Pastor of the Divine Unity Missionary Baptist Church, East Point, Georgia; Associate Minister of Antioch Baptist Church North, Atlanta, Georgia; and Associate Minister of New Shiloh Baptist Church, Baltimore, Maryland.

As Chair of Physics & DDEP at Morehouse College, his vision and leadership resulted in the department being the US #1 producer for underrepresented minorities with Bachelor of Science degrees in Physics according to the American Institute of Physics in conjunction to boasting the Nation’s most productive Dual Degree Engineering Program. He is a strong proponent of STEM mentorship using methodologies of faculty-to-student, peer-to-peer, professional shadowing, life-skills coaching, and research apprenticeship. His current research interests include micro/nano optics lithography, extreme ultraviolet interferometry, metamaterials, terahertz imaging, nanostructure characterization, and crossed phase optics.

Efrain and his group utilize neutron scattering among other methods to establish structure-property relationships in systems such as quantum materials. Efrain received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB Efrain worked with Anthony K. Cheetham, FRS. After his PhD, Efrain went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for his National Research Council post-doctoral fellowship. Efrain received the Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award in 2019 from American Crystallographic Association and the CAREER award from the NSF. In 2019, he joined the Board of Directors at the American Institute of Physics. In 2022, he was elected to the US National Committee on Crystallography and the Executive Committee of the Neutron Scattering Society of America. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers in 2022 to work as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. This year, he was recognized by the University of Maryland as a Distinguished Scholar Teacher.

Amethyst is an Afro-Latina Astrophysicist and first-generation college graduate. She received her B.S. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the Florida Institute of Technology. She currently works with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Project Science Team, with her research focused on weak gravitational lensing simulations and simulating Roman’s detector effects onto JWST NIRCam observed galaxies. Her areas of interest are dark matter/dark energy, galaxy evolution and morphology, and gravitational lensing. Amethyst is also a co-lead for NASA’s Cosmic Pathfinder’s Program. In her free time, she enjoys crafting (painting, drawing, and crocheting), gardening, cooking, and baking.

As a theoretical astrophysicist, Alejandro studies signatures of Einstein's theory of general relativity and some of its extensions on astrophysical phenomena. His work is devoted to extracting fundamental physics properties from the photon rings of black holes and investigating specific aspects of turbulent dynamics within Einstein's field equations. He was born in Bogotá (Colombia), where he earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics at Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz and a B.Sc. in Physics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he also acquired an M.Sc in Astronomy. Then, he moved to the US, earned an M.Sc in Physics at Montana State University, and completed his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Brian works on the detection and study of (ultra-) high energy neutrinos with the Askaryan Radio Array, IceCube, and Radio Neutrino Observatory-Greenland experiments. Prior to joining the faculty at UMD, Brian was an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University.

Brian completed his PhD in Physics under the direction of Prof. Amy Connolly at The Ohio State University in 2019 with the support of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His thesis focused on a search for a diffuse flux of ultra-high energy neutrinos with ARA. Prior to arriving at OSU, he earned his undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis, where he graduated with honors in 2014, majoring in physics, and minoring in math and economics. At WUSTL, Brian worked with Prof. Henric Krawczynski’s group on the hard x-ray polarimeter X-Calibur.

He is originally from Bridgeton, MO, a small town in North St. Louis county. He attended Pattonville High School (Go Pirates!), and they have written a few kind articles about my AAPF, GRFP, and research in Antarctica.

Amber received her B.S. in physics at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011, then completed her Ph.D. in physics at The Pennsylvania State University in 2017. While at Penn State, she studied a wide variety of properties of two-dimensional (2D) materials and had guest researcher positions at both the Army Research Laboratory (Adelphi, MD) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Gaithersburg, MD). After her Ph.D., Amber was awarded the National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to study magnetism in 2D materials at NIST with her postdoc advisor Dr. Angela Hight Walker. In January of 2021, Amber joined Northrop Grumman’s Microelectronics Design & Applications business Unit as a Senior Principal Physicist, where she is an experimental tester studying superconducting qubits at milli-Kelvin temperatures. Throughout her career, Amber has been passionate about inspiring future scientists and increasing diversity in physics. She’s participated in a wide variety of outreach and volunteering activities, and has been on the organizing committees of two CUWiPs and CU2MiPs. When she isn’t in the lab or doing outreach, she enjoys gardening, hiking, attempting to cook, visiting all the Smithsonian museums, and playing with her pet chinchilla.