2025 Organizers

Richie Bonventre is a staff scientist in the Physics Division studying lepton flavor physics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania for his work on SNO+. His research spans both low background and high intensity experiments, with a focus on readout electronics and firmware. He currently works on the straw tracker for the Mu2e experiment at Fermilab and readout electronics for the EOS experiment at UC Berkeley, and is also a member of the Particle Data Group.

Jan Kern is a senior scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division. He is a physical chemist by training and is combining crystallography and spectroscopy to better understand reaction mechanisms in metalloenzymes and photosynthetic systems. Jan is especially interested in understanding the initial atomic response to light driven charge separation in proteins and is working to establish novel methods to utilize femtosecond X-ray pulses from free electron X-ray laser sources for studies of these systems. He is an active user at the ALS as well as the SSRL and LCLS user facilities in Stanford.

Peter Sorensen designs, builds and characterizes novel instrumentation for beyond the standard model particle detection, with a particular emphasis on meV to keV scale signals from neutral particles. He is currently serving as the Group Leader for Detector R&D in the Physics Division at LBL.

Junze Zhou is a nanophononics researcher specializing in scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM). During his postdoctoral research at Berkeley Lab, he collaborated with imaging and nanofabrication facilities to develop advanced near-field probes for nanoimaging low-dimensional materials, focusing on exciton-plasmon interactions at the nanoscale. Currently, Zhou is exploring applications of his expertise in bioimaging by extending the working wavelength into the mid-IR range.