Career Panel Information

The University of Maryland Women in Physics group is sponsoring a Career Panel about careers outside academia on Wednesday, February 15th from 5:30 to 7:30 pm in Physics 1412. Below is a list of panelists attending:

• Joey Thompson - Partner at Alara Capital, a technology investment firm   Expanded Bio
  Since August 2011 has been a Partner (and prior to that a Venture Partner since May 2009) with Alara Capital Partners, formerly known as Guggenheim Venture Partners, a firm that primarily invests in private and public technology companies. In September 2009 he also co-founded Erdos3 Capital, an affiliate of Alara Capital that operates a quantitative hedge fund that invests primarily in domestic equities and derivatives. Since January 2011, he has served on the board of directors of COGO Optronics, a private company that designs and sells high speed optical modulators. Since December 2011 he has also served on the board of directors Giga-tronics Incorporated, a public company that designs and manufactures scientific and technical instruments and microwave components. In August 2000, Joey co-founded Circadiant Systems, a venture capital backed test and measurement company that designed and manufactured instrumentation for optical communication. As Chief Technology Officer at Circadiant, he was the product architect, defined system specifications, and at times managed both the development and manufacturing organizations prior to the company’s acquisition by JDS Uniphase Corp in October 2008. He remained at JDS Uniphase as an Engineering Development Director through December 2009, first as part of the Lab & Production Business Unit and later as part of Strategic Marketing. From January 1998 to June 2000, Joey served as a Member of Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies where he designed analog RF optoelectronic components for high speed optical communication. From 1994 to1998, Joey served as a researcher with the University of Maryland and during this time collaborated on fundamental measurements of nature including the search for and discovery of the top quark.
• Jelena Stajic - Associate Editor, Physics, for Science Magazine   Expanded Bio
  She is an associate editor at Science Magazine; her principal responsibility is to oversee the review process of papers submitted to the journal in her field, which is condensed matter and cold atom physics. She reads, evaluates, and edits papers, and sends them to external peer review. She also maintains connections with the research community by attending conferences and conducting lab visits.
• Rolf Danner - Senior Scientist in the Science and Weather Systems section at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems   Expanded Bio
  Dr. Rolf Danner is a senior scientist at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. Prior to joining Northrop Grumman he was a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He holds a PhD in experimental Physics from the Technical University Munich in Germany. Dr. Danner began his career with undergraduate and graduate research at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, at the California Institute of Technology and at observatories throughout the United States. He has taught introductory Astronomy at the University of Southern California. Dr. Danner has published numerous research papers as well as articles in popular science magazines.
• Crystal Bailey - Education and Careers Program Manager at APS   Expanded Bio
  Dr. Crystal Bailey is the Education and Careers Program Manager at the American Physical Society (APS) in College Park, MD. Crystal works on several projects which are geared towards marketing physics and physics career information to high school students, undergraduates, graduate students and physics professionals. Some of her principle projects include the physics InSight slideshow, APS Career Fairs and job boards as well as providing staff support to the APS Committee on Careers and Professional Development. Before coming to the APS, Dr. Bailey did research in nuclear physics at Indiana University, Bloomington in the area of few-body systems.
• Richard Scheper - Founder and President of Jovian Concepts, Inc., a consulting firm   Expanded Bio
  Rich Scheper received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1998, in the area of MHD plasma theory. Since then he has worked as a contractor at NASA Goddard programming ocean color simulations, as a government civilian at the Naval Research Laboratory devising advanced signal processing algorithms, and again as a contractor at the National Security Agency performing system testing and program management. He founded Jovian Concepts, Inc. in 2009 as an on-site Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) company serving the Intelligence Community. As of February 2012, Rich Scheper serves as president of Jovian Concepts, Inc., which has grown to 20 employees.
• Marcos Huerta - Special Assistant, Office of Science at U.S. Department of Energy   Expanded Bio
  Marcos Huerta received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Rice University in 2007. His policy career began as the John Bahcall Public Policy Fellow at the American Astronomical Society. He was selected as an American Institute of Physics Congressional Science Fellow in 2009, working in the House of Representatives. He currently is Special Assistant in the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.
• Jason Hamm - Deputy Director for Cooperative Threat Reduction in the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Policy Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense    Expanded Bio
  Among other responsibilities, he oversees Department of Defense activities in support of President Obama's goal to secure vulnerable nuclear materials around the world. Jason entered the Department in 2002 as a Presidential Management Fellow. Earlier that year he earned his Physics Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, where he studied experimental particle physics. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996 with a double major in Physics and Astrophysics. Jason lives in Arlington, VA with his wife (also a Ph.D. scientist-turned-govie), three-year-old daughter, and newborn son.