YPPDO Science Policy Panel with Yangyang Cheng, Laura Gladstone, and Nicole Larsen
Please join us for a virtual panel about the career paths into Science Policy and Science Communication after obtaining a PhD in physics.
Yangyang Cheng: is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, and was a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University and an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 2015, and her Bachelor’s in Science from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. She is a columnist at SupChina. Her essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, MIT Technology Review, ChinaFile, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and other publications.
Laura Gladstone: was the 2019-2020 American Physical Society Congressional Science and Technology Policy Fellow through the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She served her fellowship in the office of Senator Gary Peters working on the Committee for Homeland Security and Government Affairs. Before working in government, she researched neutrinos, working on experiments in Seattle, Italy, and the South Pole. She worked as a postdoc at MIT and Case Western Reserve University, and got her PhD and Masters at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2017, she was selected as a US delegate to the International Conference on Women in Physics in Birmingham, UK. She was a regular contributor to the popular physics blog “Quantum Diaries”. Dr. Gladstone now works as a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, VA.
Nicole Larsen: was a 2018-2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the US Department of Defense. She served as a data analyst in the Office of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (ODASD) for Energy, working first on fuel logistics and later the financial risk associated with various types of energy-related contracts. Prior to that, Dr. Larsen was a KICP Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP), where she worked on cosmic microwave background telescopes in Greenland and at the South Pole. Her PhD (Yale ’16) focused on dark matter direct detection with the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment. She recently accepted a Quantitative Data Analyst position at LinQuest Corporation, providing analytical decision support to the Joint Staff and other government clients.
Dr. Larsen is passionate about science communication. She was a regular volunteer at the Adler Planetarium, and, as a Fellow at the Yale Graduate Writing Center, led workshops on writing and presentation skills for other academics. In 2012 she interviewed Nobel Laureates Martinus Veltman and George Smoot in a Nature short film, “Confronting the Universe – Is Dark Matter Real?”
The panelists will discuss their transition from physics to science policy, their current work, and advice for graduate students and current postdocs interested in this field.
Host: Yale Physics Professional Development Organization
Sponsored by: Yale Department of Physics and the Yale Wright Laboratory
Questions? Email emma.castiglia@yale.edu
RSVP required: https://forms.gle/4UhYLKZ2vggmTVYZ9 (need to be signed into Yale gmail, email emma.castiglia@yale.edu if you do not have one)
Host: Emma Castiglia