2023-2025 Cohort

Matt Kwiecien

Matt Kwiecien is a second-year student in the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). Matt will be working with university mentor Tesla Jeltema (UCSC) and lab mentor Marc Paterno (Fermilab) in the area of collaborative software infrastructure, specifically on development of the Firecrown Pipeline for LSST DESC. He will train in the development of scientific pipelines and software architecture for experiments. Matt entered graduate school at UCSC after working in industry as a software engineering team lead.

Johannes Wagner

Johannes Wagner is a third-year Physics Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. He is passionate about designing algorithms for high-energy collider physics. Johannes will focus on collaborative software infrastructure in heterogeneous computing and statistical data analysis. He plans to leverage compute-heavy machine learning for jet flavor tagging with the ATLAS detector, in collaboration with his university mentor Heather Gray (UCB) and lab mentor Simone Pagan Griso (LBNL). As an undergraduate, Johannes minored in computer science and data science to build a solid foundation in computing.

Eric Le

Eric Le is a first-year Ph.D. student in Physics at the University of California, Irvine. He works with the ATLAS group at UCI. Eric is focused on the area of hardware-software co-design in the integration of GPUs and FPGAs for triggers and track reconstruction. He will work with university mentor Anyes Taffard (UCI) and lab mentor Viviana Cavaliere (BNL) on optimizing algorithms and improving host-kernel data transfer for event filter tracking. Eric will also develop generic host code to load kernels across FPGAs and GPUs and maintain data transfer queues across different architectures.

Luc Le Pottier

Luc Le Pottier is a second-year student in the Physics Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in the area of hardware-software co-design on FPGA-based data acquisition systems for high-energy experiments. Luc will work with university mentor Haichen Wang (UCB) and lab mentor Timon Heim (LBNL) on the development of a high-speed readout system for a pixel detector beam telescope. He is interested in improving the throughput of the system with careful attention to the hardware-software interface and limitations. In the past, Luc has lectured on machine learning in physics for undergraduates.

Russell Marroquin Solares

Russell Marroquin Solares is a first-year Physics Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego. His interests are in hardware-software co-design, specifically the implementation of advanced computational algorithms for machine learning and triggering technologies. Russell will collaborate with university mentor Javier Duarte (UCSD) and lab mentor Nhan Tran (Fermilab) to enhance the hls4ml tool for new FPGA firmware, making it possible to apply machine learning principles in FPGAs for the CMS experiment. He will also investigate pruning and supporting sparse ML models in hls4ml.