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He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland College Park. His current work focuses on differentiation and signaling within developing brain cells.

Kayla Rodriguez is a first-generation Hispanic-raised woman in physics from Riverside, California. Kayla had a long road getting to her current PhD program. Her path to UMD consisted of going to three different institutions for her Bachelor's and Master's and two gap years. Kayla started her college career at community college at RCC (Riverside City College) in 2014 and transferred to finish her bachelor of Science in physics at UCLA, where she graduated in 2018. In 2018, Kayla took a gap year, where she kept working at UCLA to do research and finished it by doing research as a staff member in her hometown, UCR (University of California, Riverside), while applying and planning for graduate school. At the end of spring 2019, She decided UCR was the best place for her to progress in school. At UCR, Kayla was admitted as a PhD student but ended up getting a masters there instead. While Kayla was at UCR, she won an NSF GRFP fellowship, did well taking a complete set of graduate physics courses, made a website of accessible graduate material which is still being used, and ended up being a co-author on two different papers on the two different projects she worked on there. During Kayla's first and second year, COVID-19 started, and she was experiencing COVID through the worry of her family and community who couldn’t work remotely. She was also from the area, a primarily Hispanic community (almost 50% of so-cal is)–both her family and surrounding community– because she was essentially seeing her community drop like flies. Luckily, she could focus through the end of her courses but started to fall behind on her research and exam studies. With this additional stress on top of her usual test anxiety, she ended up having to drop out of the program.

Kayla left UCR in the fall of 2021; She had been applying for jobs all year and got an offer to work at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She took the offer to start afresh and make more than a graduate student's salary. Kayla moved across the country for NIST, where she had a one-year contract, and from there, Kayla transitioned to the PhD program at UMD. Unfortunately, because Kayla took a job at NIST and left school, she could not retain her fellowship to fund her Ph.D. However, Kayla is currently in her second semester at UMD, and she is very much enjoying building up a new lab to do neutral atom-based quantum information and simulation.

He graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State University with a BS in physics and BSE in electrical engineering in 2022. As an undergraduate at Arizona State, he worked for four years on the development and construction of the Compact X-ray Free Electron Laser. As a graduate student at UMD, he has joined Professor Howard Milchberg’s Intense Laser-Matter Interaction Laboratory, working on research involving air filamentation to create a waveguide in air. The group also has projects in laser wakefield acceleration, remote radiation detection, and spatio-temporal optical vortices. Work in Professor Milchberg’s group involves deep knowledge of linear and nonlinear optics, plasma, and an ability to work on hands-on experiments. Outside of lab, Greg enjoys reading classic novels, watching hockey, and exploring the museums of Washington, DC.

His research focuses on using the BEC as a tool to engineer and probe different kinds of physical models, from cosmology to hydrodynamics, to facilitate the understanding of these classical and quantum physical systems.

As an international student, he also serves as a member of the Graduate Student Committee (GradComm) to help address the concerns of other members of the vibrant international student work force in the Physics department.