Biography

Kaustubh Agashe obtained his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. After conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Oregon, Johns Hopkins University and (briefly) the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton), he joined the faculty of the physics department at Syracuse University in 2005. He then moved to the University of Maryland in 2007. Professor Agashe's research is in the field of theoretical particle physics (more details are under the "personal website" link). He works on ideas going beyond the standard model of particle physics. This research includes building new models and making predictions for them which can be tested in experiments ("phenomenology") and plotting direct production of new particles at high-energy colliders and calculating their indirect detection in lower-energy experiments.

Biography

Theoretical condensed matter physicist Maissam Barkeshli joined the UMD Department of Physics as an Assistant Professor and a JQI Fellow in August, 2016.

Barkeshli received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2010 following a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a BA in Physics from UC Berkeley. He was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2010-2013) and a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft's Station Q, located at UC Santa Barbara (2013-2016).

He works on complex many-body phenomena involving condensed matter physics, quantum field theory, quantum topology, and quantum information theory. He also works on the science of deep learning, studying fundamental principles underlying the inner workings of modern AI models. In 2018, he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. 

Biography

Christopher Jarzynski received his A.B. (with high honors) in 1987 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in 1994 from University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on statistical mechanics and thermodynamics at the molecular level, with a particular focus on the foundations of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. His research group has worked on topics that include the application of statistical mechanics to problems of biophysical interest; the analysis of artificial molecular machines; the development of efficient numerical schemes for estimating thermodynamic properties of complex systems; the relationship between thermodynamics and information processing; quantum and classical shortcuts to adiabaticity; and quantum thermodynamics. Jarzynski is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a UMD Distinguished University Professor. He received the 2019 Lars Onsager Prize for theoretical statistical physics, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2020 Simons Fellowship. In 2020, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.