Six Yale Physics undergraduates—Nathan Burns, Shwetlana Jha, Nikita Mazotov, Diya Naik, Jared Wyetzner, and Iffat Zarif—attended the 2025 Physics and Astronomy Congress (SPSCon 2025)(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) from October 30-November 1 in Denver, Colorado. The theme of the conference was Σupporting Our Πhase Σhifts. Four of the students have current or former affiliations with Wright Lab.
Five of the students were recognized in the SPSCon 2025 poster competition. There were 368 total entries for the competition, 19 finalists, and 10 awards given. Mazotov was the overall winner for the entire competition, and Jha was the overall runner up. Burns won the Research category. Naik and Zarif placed as finalists.
The poster titles were:
- Burns: “Measuring Parameters for the SiPM-on-Tile Hadronic Calorimeter”
- Jha: “Correcting for Y Errors with the Bacon Shor Code”
- Mazotov: “Improving Mu2e Trigger Timing”
- Naik: “Simulating Dual Rail Erasure Errors for Quantum Error Correcting Codes”
- Wyetzner: “Stochastic Physical Neural Networks”
- Zarif: “Improving Beam Monitoring for the Mu2e Experiment”
According to the conference website, “the 2025 theme was chosen by the program committee to describe the radical shifts current physics and astronomy majors have experienced in recent years …[and the goal was] to share with students how to shift into the next phase of their career—whether that is going to grad school, pursuing a career in industry or a national lab, or something completely unique.”
Naik said “I found Physcon 2025 to be an incredibly rewarding experience. I got to hear from undergrad researchers across the country, and hear amazing speakers present, including Jocelyn Bell Burrell! This was my first conference, and it was amazing to see the work of physics students across the country.”
Naik continued, “One of the things that has been rewarding about being co-president of SPS [the Yale Society of Physics Students(Link is external) (Link opens in new window)] is that we can really help opportunities like this come to life for Yale undergrads.”
This story is a duplicate of the Wright Lab news story of November 20, 2025, by Victoria Misenti. See link to the original article below.