Orange Alert

Physics Alumni Updates - December 2023

Posted on: Dec. 13, 2023

Danielle German headshot

Danielle German was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship 2023. She graduated from Syracuse in May 2021 with her bachelor’s in physics and is currently a graduate student at Brown University. Congratulations Danielle.

Dr. Taviare Hawkins headshot

Dr. Taviare Hawkins was hired at Wagner College, NY as the inaugural assistant provost for research, development, and civic engagement.

See the announcement

In spring 2023, two of our alumni revisited campus to deliver colloquiums on their post-degree experiences and careers in Physics.

Thomas Vo

Thomas Vo is currently an Optical Metrology Engineer at Meta. He received a bachelor’s in physics and astronomy at the University of Washington. He then spent 3 years in LIGO Hanford as an operations specialist for Advanced LIGO upgrades. He started graduate school at Syracuse University here he spent the majority of his time working to commission the LIGO detectors for an observing run focusing on tuning and understanding adaptive optics. After obtaining his PhD in March of 2019 he spent one year at Block Engineering working with quantum cascade lasers for spectroscopic applications, specifically, chemical warfare detection. He moved to Seattle in 2020 to work with Facebook Reality Labs on VR/AR/MR technology development.

Jaysin Lord

Jaysin Lord currently holds an Associate position at Goldman Sachs in New York City. Just 6 years ago while working with the LIGO collaboration, Jaysin made the decision to pursue a career in finance despite having no formal financial education. Having read several books on stock and equity derivatives, he started trading from his dorm room. After being caught trading during lectures on several occasions, he was reminded by professors that studies come before extracurriculars. Still wanting to trade, Jaysin then started writing software to do everything from trade stock, to converse with his friends and family via text message. Upon graduation his career would take him from financial modeling to derivatives trading at some of the largest firms on Wall Street.

With his presentation Jason wanted to enforce the student’s feelings that they have made a good decision choosing to pursue an education in physics, point out how physics and the Syracuse University Physics Department in particular has been a support for his success and give detail into some of the technical aspects of a few of the more complex financial instruments.

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