Xinchang “Cathy” Li received her PhD in Civil Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the guidance of Prof. Lei Zhao. Her dissertation focused on the mechanisms, effects, and modeling of the interactions between the urban environment and energy use across global to local scales. She combines theory, Earth system modeling, and artificial intelligence/machine learning methods to inform stakeholders on developing sustainable urban energy pathways. She is the recipient of the Engelbrecht Fellowship at UIUC and the Andrew Slater Award from NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). 

At PNNL, Cathy is a member of the Regional and Cloud Modeling Group in the Atmospheric, Climate, and Earth Science Division, working with Casey Burleyson, TC Chakraborty, and Yun Qian. Her current work aims to elucidate the interacting effects of urban building electrification and city-integrated solar energy on urban heat and cold extremes.

Peter Lalor completed his PhD in computational nuclear science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His PhD work focused on mathematical methods for calculating the material composition of X-ray scans of cargo containers. While at MIT, Peter was a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship recipient.

 At PNNL, Peter is a member of the Foundational Data Science group within the National Security Directorate's Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics division. His research explores physics informed machine learning methods for material identification and detection.

Payton Beeler received her PhD in Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering with Rajan Chakrabarty at Washington University in St. Louis. Her PhD work focused on using epidemic modeling to establish associations between long-term air pollution exposure and the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, and developing improved optical models for black carbon aerosols.

Payton is currently a member of the Atmospheric, Climate, and Earth Sciences Division under the mentorship of Laura Fierce. Her primary research is focused on developing particle-resolved models to improve the representation of smoke aerosols in Earth system models.

Krista Kulesa earned her PhD in Inorganic Chemistry at Indiana University in Bloomington, under the mentorship of Prof. Jeremy Smith and Prof. Lane Baker. Her thesis work focused on electrosynthesis and electrocatalytic remediation of nitrogen cycle intermediates, nitrogen oxide pollutants, and greenhouse gases. During her thesis, Krista received a DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program award to conduct high-pressure electrochemistry at PNNL.

At PNNL, Krista is a member of the Catalysis Science group in the Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate under the guidance of Tom Autrey and Eric Wiedner. Her current research focuses on the development of atomically precise electrocatalyst materials for the reversible energy storage in organic hydrogen carriers. As part of this work, she plans to develop a high-throughput electrochemistry platform to accelerate the discovery of structure-function relationships and optimize bidirectional energy storage and retrieval.

Jeff Czajka earned his PhD from the Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering department at Washington University in St. Louis. His work focused on using experimental and modeling techniques to characterize microbial metabolism under Dr. Yinjie Tang. During his thesis, Jeff received a DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program fellowship, his departmental Dissertation Award, and an NSF INTERN Award. 

Jeff is currently a member of the Biological Conversion Team in the Energy and Environment Directorate. His research interest is in fungal bioprocess development and modeling. Jeff’s current work aims to develop machine learning modeling techniques for microbial strain design, thereby helping to facilitate greener biomanufacturing capabilities.

S M Ferdous received his PhD in computer science with Prof. Alex Pothen from Purdue University. His primary research is in combinatorial scientific computing, which involves representing scientific problems by combinatorial (or discrete) objects, often as graphs, modeling the scientific problem as an optimization on graphs, and developing efficient, scalable, and elegant solutions to the modeled problem. He works at the intersection of theory and practice, focusing on designing, developing, and implementing efficient algorithms in various scientific computing applications.

He is currently a member of the Data Science and Machine Intelligence group, which Dr. Mahantesh Halappanavar leads. Ferdous's current interest is in developing algorithms for streaming, online, and dynamic data. He was awarded the prestigious Ross and John R. Rice Fellowship during his PhD at Purdue.

Mickey Rogers earned her PhD in analytical chemistry from The Ohio State University. Mickey is working with the Terrestrial-Atmospheric Processes Integrated Research Platform in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory under the mentorship of Swarup China. She is studying biological aerosol with a focus on airborne algal cells and fragments that become aerosolized in our atmosphere. Her research uses electron microscopy and mass spectrometry to explore innovative atmospheric and industrial applications for airborne algae including new carbon sequestration pathways. Biological aerosols also offer unique insights into atmospheric phenomena such as cloud and ice formation.

In addition to being a 2022 Pauling Fellow, she is a 2021 recipient of the Phycological Society of America’s Bold Award and a 2020 awardee of the American Geophysical Union’s Dr. Edmond M. Dewan Young Scientist scholarship. Mickey is passionate about translating science into nontechnical language to engage with policymakers and future generations of researchers.

Ana Arteaga received her PhD from Oregon State University under the mentorship of Dr. May Nyman. Ana’s dissertation work focused on studying the formation of uranyl peroxide clusters in solution and the solid state using a wide range of X-ray and spectroscopic techniques.  

Ana is currently a member of the Nuclear & Radiochemistry team in the Global Nuclear Science and Technology group in the National Security Directorate. She is mentored by Robert Gian Surbella. Her current research focuses on leveraging well-defined trivalent actinide (Pu, Am, Cm) oxide nanocluster chemistry to delineate periodic trends in the electronic and coordination environments, physical and chemical properties in solution, and the solid state to address the need to advance fundamental transuranic chemistry.

Jeremy Gaison earned his PhD in physics from Yale University. He conducted research at Wright Laboratory under his advisor, Karsten Heeger, and he was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. His work focused on developing and implementing novel detection techniques for neutrinos produced in nuclear reactors. Jeremy also has a BS in physics and mathematics from Drexel University.

Jeremy is continuing his work developing new detector technologies as part of the Fundamental Physics group at PNNL under the guidance of Brent Vandevender. By characterizing radio frequency signals of electrons undergoing cyclotron motion in a magnetic field, Jeremy aims to measure the mass scale of neutrinos. This measurement will have broader implications for cosmology and pave the way for other precision measurements of nuclear processes.

Bram Stone earned his PhD in biology from the University of Mississippi, where he studied the ecological patterns of bacterial communities on plant leaves under Colin Jackson. Following his doctoral research, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar with Bruce Hungate at the Center for Ecosystems Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. There, he used stable isotope probing to explore the activity and growth of individual bacterial populations within their natural soil environment.

At PNNL, Bram is working on the Microbiome Science Team with Kirsten Hofmockel. His work will measure the distribution of key traits related to carbon use efficiency across the bacterial tree of life. His work continues to develop the potential for stable isotopes, particularly heavy oxygen, to quantify the complex expression of bacterial traits in natural settings. He plans to utilize the cutting-edge technologies at PNNL to link microbial activity with soil carbon formation and decomposition.

Andy Lin earned his PhD from the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. His doctoral research, under Bill Noble, focused on developing computational methods for analyzing liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry-based proteomics data. Prior to his PhD, he received his BS in bioinformatics and cell molecular biology from the University of Michigan.

Andy currently works in the Chemical and Biological Signatures group, under the mentorship of Karen Wahl, in the National Security Directorate. His work at PNNL focuses on using proteomics data to understand how bacterial protein samples naturally degrade over time. Using this information, he plans on developing a predictive model for estimating the length of time a bacterial sample has been degrading.