IYQ'25 CONFERENCE

DANIEL CAPIC (LaGuardia/CUNY). Daniel Capic was born and raised in Staten Island. He earned his B.S. in physics and mathematics from Stony Brook University before completing his Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center under the advisement of Distinguished Professor Eugene Chudnovsky at Lehman College. His research focuses on skyrmions, magnetic structures with potential applications in data storage.

J. ELIZABETH CLARK (LaGuardia/CUNY). J. Elizabeth Clark shares her ideas about writing and technology at LaGuardia Community College — City University of New York where, as Professor of English, she teaches composition, children’s literature, and fiction writing. Liz is a published poet and has written articles on subjects such as ePortfolios, writing pedagogy, pedagogy and technology, digital rhetoric, assessment, women's studies, the poetry of HIV/AIDS and NBC's The West Wing. Most recently she has turned her attention to writing for children, specifically focusing on fiction and marine biology.

CHRISTOPHER FARLEY (LaGuardia/CUNY). Christopher Farley first studied physics at Fordham University, earning his BS in 2004. After many years away from science and academia, he returned to graduate school at the CUNY Graduate Center to study chemistry under the supervision of Dr. Charles Michael Drain, with a concentration in nanotechnology and materials science. In Dr. Drain’s lab at Hunter College, he studied the photophysical properties of porphyrins and phthalocyanines through various experimental and computational techniques, ultimately earning his PhD in 2016. These brilliantly colored, light-absorbing molecules underpin a vast array of natural biochemical reactions, including the global-scale conversion of solar energy into biological matter. They also find application in fields as diverse as textile dyes, information storage, catalysis, biomedical imaging, anti-cancer medicines, and multi-functional theranostics. His post-graduate work continues to straddle the boundary between chemistry and physics, where he has published several papers exploring the effects of molecular structure on fundamental light-matter interactions. In his work, Dr. Farley couples practical spectroscopy with modern, high-level quantum chemical calculations to reveal important aspects of molecular structure and function that could not be ascertained from either method independently.

KARAN KUMAR (LaGuardia alumnus, Ph.D. student at Columbia University). Karan Kumar earned his bachelor's degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Stony Brook University. During his undergraduate studies, he worked on the reconstruction of Water Cherenkov events using neural networks and contributed to calculating theoretical predictions for the flux of neutrinos in the LHC FASER experiment. His primary research interest lies in experimental high-energy particle physics.

ROMAN SENKOV (LaGuardia/CUNY). Roman Senkov earned his Ph.D. from the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (Novosibirsk, Russia), focusing on many-body calculations of electromagnetic moments of heavy nuclei. Before joining LaGuardia in 2014, he conducted research at Michigan State University and Central Michigan University. His work in theoretical nuclear physics explores nuclear level densities, quantum chaos and thermalization, neutrinoless double-β decay, and CP violation in atomic and nuclear systems. One of his less typical works, done in collaboration with Dr. Andrei Pomeransky, led to the discovery and investigation of the Pomeransky-Senkov black rings – solution that describes an asymptotically flat doubly rotating black ring in five dimensions, whose self-gravity is exactly balanced by the centrifugal force arising from the rotation in the ring direction.

SANTIAGO SOLÉ-DOMĖNECH (Weill Cornell Medical College). Santiago Solé-Domėnech obtained his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Girona (Spain) in 2006. Shortly after, he enrolled in the Medical Science graduate program at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden), where his research focused on optimizing imaging mass spectrometry for the study of Alzheimer’s disease tissue. He earned his doctorate in March 2012 and subsequently joined the Maxfield lab at Weill Cornell Medicine. There, he transitioned to new approaches in cell biology and live fluorescence brain imaging.

Santiago’s research focuses on developing novel biochemical imaging techniques to uncover the mechanisms regulating lysosome biology – small cellular organelles responsible for degrading substrates and chemicals – in microglia and peripheral macrophages, the brain's immune cells. His work aims to develop innovative therapeutic strategies to enhance the clearance of brain amyloid-beta in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

An extensive profile can be found on LinkedIn. Selected publications can be found here.

FRANK WANG (LaGuardia/CUNY). Frank Wang did his undergraduate research with Professor James M. Daniels, who in 1953 used the paramagnetic salt cerium magnesium nitrate (CMN) adiabatic demagnetization to achieve a low temperature below 0.01 kelvin at Oxford University’s Clarendon Laboratory. In 1956 Professor Chien-Shiung Wu adopted the Oxford technique to use CMN to freeze cobalt 60 nuclei to nearly absolute zero to conduct her historical experiment that overthrew the parity conservation law in the weak interaction. Frank received his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University, and his dissertation topic was pulsars, which were first discovered by another legendary female physicist Professor Jocelyn Bell. Dr. Wang has written several papers to enhance public understanding of the achievements of female mathematicians and physicists, including Emmy Noether, Sofya Kovalevskaya, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Mary Cartwright, and Mary Tsingou; see https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.2129 and https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.2671.