Structure and Dynamics Group

Allan's MS thesis involved a variational Monte Carlo study of confined quantum particles in external fields, which he successfully defended in 2008. He pursued further graduate studies at the Department of Physics of Osaka University. He obtained his PhD in Physics there doing research in theoretical high energy physics and cosmology, particularly on inflationary models of the universe. He is now an Associate Professor at the UP Los Baños Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Physics.

Sheen obtained her BS Applied Physics degree in 2020 with the support of a DOST-SEI Undergraduate S&T Scholarship. For her thesis, she determined the effect of adding additional interacting atoms to the phonon density of states in a silicene junction, using a harmonic interaction model until the next-nearest neighboring atoms. She spent a lot of her free time with her labmates and friends in SanD, which has been a home to her. She is now working as a risk analyst.

Eia obtained her MS degree in physics in 2011. In her research she used epidemiological models to simulate the spread of malware. As a graduate student she was a university RA and the systems administrator of SanD. Eia is a reservoir engineer for the second largest geothermal energy producer in the world at their headquarters in Ortigas. As part of her career development, she spent several months in Reykjavik as a participant in a geothermal energy training program.

Carlos defended his PhD dissertation on spin-polarized currents in nanowires in December 2015. His research was supported by a CHED scholarship and a UPD OVCRD dissertation grant. The results of his work has been presented in conferences around the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and Singapore. Carlos has worked as a University Research Associate for SanD from 2013-2015. In 2016 he joined the Mapúa Institute of Technology Department of Physics.

Rona is a faculty member of the UPLB Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Physics. She successfully defended her MS Physics thesis on spin-orbit entanglement in a two-dimensional electron gase in 2015. She is currently pursuing a PhD degree at the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences at the Academia Sinica with a research focus on vibrational spectroscopy.

Donna graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree in Applied Physics. She later obtained postgraduate certificates in Information Technology from the UP ITTC (now ITDC) and Stanford, as well as a Master's degree in Technology Management from the UP TMC. She is also a PMI-certified Project Management Professional and her expertise in project management has been valued by several consulting and technology firms. Donna now works for a German banking and financial services company where she holds a senior management position in financial engineering.

Marc graduated cum laude with a Bachelor's degree in Applied Physics in 2020. For his undergraduate thesis research, he used Monte Carlo techniques and an agent-based model to simulate cell and tissue growth on a plane. Marc is also an avid data scientist and has helped esports players use tournament data to analyze the meta. He now works as a risk underwriting analyst for a financing firm.

Raymart obtained his BS Physics degree from Silliman University in 2015. He then moved to NIP to pursue an MS Physics degree with the support of a DOST-SEI ASTHRDP Graduate Scholarship. He completed the MS Physics program in 2018 having done research on locating quantum critical transitions in a long-range Kitaev chain by analyzing work statistics in a sudden quench. He is a currently a Masters student under the Biomicro System Technology program of Korea University.

Marc completed his Bachelor's degree in Applied Physics last 2020. As the SanD systems administrator, he was responsible for managing the group's computing cluster. In 2019 he interned at the Philippine Genome Center Core and developed an interest in bioinformatics. For his undergraduate thesis he investigated the application of graph convolutional networks for predicting potential therapeutic protein targets in a biological network. He worked briefly at the Philippine Genome Center Biosurveillance Team analyzing SARS-CoV-2 samples before joining the Asian Institute of Management's MS Data Science program.

Mel completed his MS degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 2017 with the support of the DOST ASTHRD Program. He used density functional theory to perform electronic structure and nudged elastic band calculations to model the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide with an organocobalt catalyst. He obtained his BS degree in Chemistry from UP Diliman and was one of the top scorers in the 2016 Licensure Examination for Chemists.

Nick graduated cum laude from the BS Physics program in 2017. His research was on finding simple ways to improve the outcomes of machine learning by deep neural networks. Also, as the HPC systems administrator of SanD, he has worked to integrate GPU capabilities into the laboratory's computing facility. He is now a data scientist for an AI consulting and development company in San Diego.

Tristan completed the NIP BS Applied Physics program in 2021. He used natural language processing techniques to perform an automated and unsupervised classification of a large number of scientific articles for his undergraduate thesis. He now uses his programming skills and knowledge of machine learning models as a data analyst for a multi-industry financial services company.

Leon graduated from the BS Applied Physics program in 2022 with magna cum laude distinction. Having been interested in coding and computational physics since high school, he chose to do his thesis on the simulation of separating confined particles undergoing Brownian motion.  He immediately followed a career path in data science by joining several training programs in data analysis.

Agatha obtained her BS degree in Physics in 2005. Soon after, she worked for a teleservices company where she provided directory assistance for its client customers. She was later involved with several financial services and banking firms as a fraud investigator, customer fulfillment specialist, and research & investigation officer. In 2010 she became a customer support executive for a multinational media and information company. She has since joined a services provider of an international law firm where she is a senior interaction coordinator tasked to maintain and manage databases.

Raffy obtained his BS Applied Physics degree in 2021. While he was a student at SanD, his main research interest was in machine learning and the construction of generative adversarial networks that could produce images from text input. He is now a professional data analyst for a mobility-as-a-service provider. 

Joshua completed the BS Physics program in 2016. He has worked for SanD as its high-performance computing (HPC) systems administrator using the knowledge and skills he learned from an ICTP Workshop on HPC Architecture and Applications in Trieste. He is now a systems administrator for a research project based at the UPD Marine Science Institute and manages its connection to the Philippine Genome Center's IBM BlueGene system. Joshua also provides HPC consulting services for the International Rice Research Institute and the PGC Core Facility for Bioinformatics.

Alena graduated cum laude in 2021, completing the BS Applied Physics program as a DOST-SEI Merit Scholar. For her research work she used a sparse autoencoder to identify anomalous network intrusions from connection metadata. She has applied her knowledge in data science by analyzing financial data for fraudulent transactions. Alena is currently a data engineer tasked with maintaining the datalake and ETL pipelines for her company's data infrastructure.

Faye Espalmado completed the BS Applied Physics program in 2022 with the support of a DOST Merit Scholarship. She made extensive use of her computing skills for her undergraduate thesis project, where she used a particle swarm optimization algorithm to simulate the folding of a hydrophobic-polar protein model on a two-dimensional square lattice. After graduating from NIP, she intends to continue pursuing her interests in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Ian finished the BS Physics program in 2018. His undergraduate thesis work focused on using Python libraries to achieve GPU acceleration in intensive algebraic calculations. He has worked as a staffer for PhDIA Project 161614, ECWRG Project 2018-1-009, and the Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas. He is now a systems developer for an IT solutions provider.