Current physREFS

Joheen Chakraborty

joheen@mit.edu | Astrophysics | REFS since 2024

Joheen grew up in Edison (like the inventor), a suburb in New Jersey with lots of good Indian food. He went to Columbia University in NYC for undergrad, and continued his northward drift to MIT for grad school in 2022. He works on high-energy astrophysics, X-ray astronomy, and high-performance computing. In his free time, he like to play video games and musical instruments.

Lisa Drummond

lisadrum@mit.edu | Room 37-638 | Astrophysics | REFS since 2019

Lisa was born in Brisbane, Australia and moved to Melbourne for her undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne. She studied neutron stars for her Masters and now studies black holes. In her free time, she enjoys travel, watching TV and looking at pictures of cute animals.

Rahul Jayaraman

rjayaram@mit.edu | Room 37-624 | Astrophysics | REFS since 2020

Rahul (he/him/his) is a first-year Astro grad student from California, but he has experience dealing with the cold Northeast winters after his four years at Brown. He works with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) group on transient detection and follow-up, but outside of that, he is involved in the GSC and other outreach organizations. In his free time, he likes to watch foreign TV shows, keep up with politics, and watch airplanes land.

Eugene Knyazev

knyazev@mit.edu | Room NW22-235 | Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics | REFS since 2020

Eugene (he/him) is a third year grad student in the AMO division. He enjoys water sports, in summer he often can be found sailing in the Charles River. Eugene is passionate about the Physics community and strives to make it better.

Lisa Lin

iamlll@mit.edu | Biophysics | REFS since 2022

Lisa (she/hers) is from the Chicago suburbs and went to UChicago for her undergrad, then finally decided to get out of Illinois for grad school, where she studies biological active matter. In her free time, she enjoys playing the clarinet, knitting, and cooking and baking.

Ari Liu

arily@mit.edu | Room 46-5125 | Biophysics | REFS since 2022

Ari (they/them) is a second year grad student in the biophysics division studying neuroscience problems. They grew up in Guangdong, China and came to the states in 2016 for undergrad at Wesleyan University (CT). Outside of research, they enjoy playing the piano, reading fiction, live theater, traveling, and binge watching TV shows. 

Makinde Ogunnaike

ogunnaik@mit.edu | Room 6C-205 | Condensed Matter Theory | REFS since 2019

Makinde is from Delaware, but practically from a suburb Philadelphia. He came up to Boston for undergrad, went to Oxford for a year to study Philosophy of Physics, then came back here for grad. school. In his free time, he enjoys playing soccer, attempting to play piano, and watching stupid anime. He also likes amassing and sharing copious amounts of chocolate and tea.

Emily Qiu

ehqiu@mit.edu | Room 26-335 | Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics | REFS since 2022

Emily (she/hers) is from Toronto, Canada, where she did her undergraduate studies in Engineering Physics. She did her Masters in Paris, where she baked croissants and travelled via overnight bus (which she does NOT recommend). She currently works in the group of Vladan Vuletic on arrays of ultracold atomic ensembles towards quantum simulation and quantum information processing. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and binge-watching trashy Netflix reality shows.

Brandon Roach

roachb@mit.edu | Room 26-544 | Nuclear and Particle Experiment | REFS since 2019

Brandon grew up in Southeast Michigan, and studied physics at the University of Notre Dame. In the lab, he specializes in using X-ray detectors to search for decaying dark-matter particles. When not at work, he enjoys running, reading, painting, and learning languages (both human and computer!).

Kaitlyn Shin

kshin@mit.edu | Room 37-638 | Astrophysics | REFS since 2019

Kaitlyn grew up in Long Island, NY, before heading off to Stanford to study physics (after somewhat escaping the CS vortex there). She likes observational high-energy astrophysics and currently works with fast radio bursts. When not researching, she does astro-related outreach, attempts to read, and watches way too much TV.

Yifan Su

yifansu2@mit.edu | Room 13-2142 | Condensed Matter Experiment | REFS since 2019

Yifan is originally from Shanghai, China. After spending 2 years each in Urbana, IL and Ithaca, NY, he finally returned to urban life when he started grad school at MIT. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and billiards. He also keeps a habit of watching and reading stuff in Japaneses to prevent his second foreign language from degrading.

Jingyi Wang

jingyiw@mit.edu | Room 37-626H | Astrophysics | REFS since 2023

Jingyi grew up in Hangzhou, China, and went to the US for grad school. She is now a 5th year in the astrophysics division, working on black hole observations. She also likes to learn how people apply machine learning to physics research, so she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics, Statistics, and Data Science (IDPS). In her spare time, she enjoys (film) photography, and journaling, and is trying to return to the gym a million times.

Kelsey Yee

kelseyy@mit.edu | Nuclear and Particle Experiment | REFS since 2022

Kelsey (she/her/hers) is a second year graduate student searching for dark matter signatures in cosmic rays. She studied at Northeastern University as an undergraduate student and found a love of particle physics from a six-month co-op at CERN. Outside the lab, Kelsey enjoys drawing, cycling, D&D, video games, and cooking.