Panelists

Jilian Ireland
Assistant Staff
MIT Lincoln Lab

Masha Kamenetska
Assist Prof. of Chemistry & Physics
Boston University

Emily Lesser
Leader of the Systems and Analysis Group
MIT Lincoln Lab

Giulia Menichetti
PI and Junior Faculty at Harvard Medical School
Affiliated Faculty at the Network Science Institute

Laura Ross
Senior Technical Staff
MIT Lincoln Lab

Sarah C. Schlotter
Patent Attorney
Wolf Greenfield

Giulia Semeghini
Assistant Prof. of Applied Physics
Harvard University

Caroline Aust

Caroline Aust is a member of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center focusing on technology in support of national security. As an analyst in the Systems and Analysis group, Caroline develops physics-based models and conducts technical analyses to assess issues impacting U.S. aircraft capabilities. In her time at Lincoln Caroline has conducted studies on a variety of topics and briefed results to government senior leaders. Prior to Lincoln, Caroline completed a B.A. in Physics at Cornell University. While at Cornell, she was involved in research efforts to conduct precision measurements of the top quark mass leveraging data from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

Rebecca Dally

NRC Postdoctoctoral Fellowship to work at the Center for Neutron Research at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology

Sadia Hoq

Sadia Hoq is a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Systems & Analysis group, where she has worked for six years. In that time, her analysis has focused on a variety of topics impacting aircraft survivability, including physics-based modeling and simulation as well as data analysis of RF and IR sensors. Prior to joining the laboratory, Sadia received a B.A. in Astronomy and Physics, and a Masters and PhD in Astronomy from Boston University. While at BU, her research focused on star clusters as distance indicators in the galaxy as well as the impact of the galactic magnetic field on star formation.

Jilian Ireland

Jillian Ireland attended undergrad at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster PA where she double majored in physics and economics. During her undergraduate program, Jill researched condensed matter physics, quantum optics for education, and also some economics research that was cut short due to the pandemic. Following graduation in 2021, Jill worked as an analyst at a recruitment advertising firm where she tracked conversion metrics and made suggestions to improve customer outcomes. She joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory in November of 2022 as an assistant staff where she has been studying missile dynamics while also working to validate a contrail formation model.

Masha Kamenetska

Masha Kamenetska is an assistant professor at Boston University in the departments of Chemistry and Physics. She is an experimental scientist with a research focus that spans these two disciplines. Her lab is focused on developing single molecule spectroscopies for untangling structure-property relationships in molecular materials and biological systems on the sub-nanometer level. In 2023, she served as a co-chair of the CUWiP conference at Boston University. She is looking forward to another inspiring CUWiP event in 2024!

Lisa Krayer

Lisa is an Ambassador based in Boston Consulting Group (BCG)’s Washington DC office. Her research is focused on AI and DeepTech. Prior to BCG Lisa was a Graduate Student at University of Maryland. Outside of work, she likes to hike, play video games and bake bread and is interested in fantasy and scifi.

Emily Lesser

Emily Lesser is the leader of the Systems and Analysis Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a federally-funded research and development center (FFRDC) focused on technology for national security. Her group investigates the survivability of US air defense assets through modeling and simulation backed by field and flight testing. Her work has influenced acquisition programs within the Department of Defense as well as capabilities for the warfighter. Emily joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 2011, and her early projects involved flight testing and analysis of Infrared systems. She has also served as a mentor in various career development and technical education programs. Prior to joining MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Emily earned a B.S. in Chemistry from MIT and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Stanford University. For her graduate work at Stanford, she leveraged ultrafast Infrared spectroscopy to study the hydrogen bonding dynamics of water in constrained environments.

Giulia Menichetti

Dr. Menichetti is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and an affiliated faculty member at the Network Science Institute (Northeastern University). She is a statistical/computational physicist by training, and during her Ph.D. she specialized in Network Science. She currently leads the Foodome project, which aims to track the full chemical complexity of the food we consume and develop quantitative tools to unveil, at the mechanistic level, the impact of these chemicals on our health. More recently, for her work on reproducible food quality metrics and informed decision-making, she was selected by the Rockefeller Foundation and Acumen Academy for the inaugural cohort of the Food Systems Fellowship, a 1-year program supporting 20 world leaders acting on the complexity of food systems.

Amber McCreary

Dr. Amber McCreary 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 two-dimensional materials at NIST with her postdoc advisor Dr. Angela Hight Walker. In January of 2021, Amber joined Northrop Grumman’s Transformational Computing Organizational Unit as a Senior Principal Physicist, where she is an experimental tester studying the interfacing of superconducting qubits and digital logic. Throughout her career, Amber has been passionate regarding outreach and DE&I efforts, and has been on the organizing committee of two CUWiPs.

Laura Ross

Laura Ross is a Senior Technical Staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a federally-funded research and development center (FFRDC) focused on national security. Laura focuses on advanced radar system algorithm development and data analysis for the Tactical Defense Systems group. This work includes designing, integrating and testing prototype novel radar systems to answer key questions on U.S. air vehicle survivability for the Department of the Air Force. Laura has had the opportunity to have real impact on many DoD programs and brief government and military senior leaders. Prior to her time at MITLL, Laura received a B.S. in Physics from MIT. She later received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from BU while she was employed at MITLL. Both her undergraduate and graduate research focused on studying ionospheric plasma dynamics and utilized both radar and optical sensors at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and HAARP Observatory in Alaska.

Sarah C. Schlotter

Sarah Schlotter focuses her practice on patent prosecution across a range of technology. Sarah regularly supports clients in areas including quantum computing and telecommunication, low-temperature physics, medical devices, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), including both microfabrication techniques and MEMS devices, and integrated photonics. Sarah also has experience supporting clients in areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence and bioinformatics. Sarah’s intellectual property experience includes patent application drafting, patent prosecution, and IP diligence, including patentability and freedom-to-operate analyses. Prior to joining Wolf Greenfield, Sarah completed her PhD in Applied Physics at Harvard University. She was jointly advised by Professor Amir Yacoby in the Department of Physics at Harvard University and Professor Geoffrey Beach in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Her research focused on the engineering of magnetic thin films for low power data storage applications and nitrogen-vacancy center magnetometry.

Giulia Semeghini

Giulia Semeghini, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, is an experimentalist whose research centers on quantum simulation of complex materials and quantum information processing on neutral atom platforms. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florence, and completed her undergraduate and master’s work at the University of Milan. Since 2019, she has been a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Mikhail Lukin’s group at Harvard.