Structure and Dynamics Group

Jerome obtained his BS Physics degree in 2017 with cum laude honors. For his BS thesis he derived thermodynamic equations for a chain of spins that are individually coupled to different heat baths. His undergraduate studies was supported by a DOST-SEI Undergraduate Merit Scholarship. He has also been an instructor at the NIP and later picked up his MS Physics (non-thesis) degree in 2022. He is currently a faculty member at the Palawan State University.

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 has worked in executive positions and project management roles in several banking, financial, and IT services companies.

With the support of a DOST-SEI Merit Scholarship, Jayven completed the BS Applied Physics program in 2024, graduating magna cum laude. He studied how well different ODE models fit the volume growth dynamics of cultured cancerous cell colonies and tumors in a patient's body.  

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 doing research on locating quantum critical transitions in a Kitaev chain with long-range interactions. In 2022 he completed the Biomicro System Technology Master's program at the Korea University as he follows his ambition to become a researcher on cancer therapies.

Jami obtained her BS in Applied Physics degree in 2024. Her undergraduate thesis work involved the simulation of a population of individuals with a varying number of reproduction cycles within their lifetime.

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.

Richmond completed the BS Applied Physics program in 2020. His student research work was on numerical simulations of random walks in the presence of drift forces. He now applies his computing and programming skills to analyze logistical data for an e-commerce company.

April finished the BS Applied Physics program in 2008 and the MS Physics program in 2016. She has worked for an IT services provider and trained in IBM business server programming and operations, handling RPG development tasks on financial systems. She was later hired by an e-commerce company as a JDE developer and, later, supervisor for their back-end operations. She also has an interest in trading and portfolio and risk management. April is currently an instructor at the New Era University.

Alyana obtained her Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics degree in 2023. Her thesis showcased a similarity search technique called locality-sensitive hashing for classifying article abstracts and titles from the arXiv repository. She now serves a universal banking institution as a data analytics officer for business transformation and development, where she applies her skills to drive data-driven strategies and business growth.

Kryzz graduated from the BS Applied Physics program in 2019 with the support of a DOST-SEI RA 7687 Undergraduate S&T Scholarship. His undergraduate thesis focused on parallelization of the density matrix renormalization group with the matrix product state ansatz. He is pursuing a career in data science and is currently an analyst for a company that provides business communications solutions.

Rafael graduated from the BS Physics program in June 2016. He is a Leticia Shahani awardee for the Most Outstanding BS Physics Thesis and a 2016 BPI-DOST Science Awardee. In 2014 he worked as a staffer for the OVPAA-BPhD-2012-05 research project and in 2015 as a student assistant for SanD. He later obtained his MS Physics (non-thesis) degree in 2020. Rafael is continuing his studies as a PhD Physics student.

Krishna finished the BS Applied Physics program in 2020. Her research focused on the characterization of the phonon density of states in a graphene junction with beyond nearest-neighbor interactions. Her stay in SanD helped her grow and improved her research and group dynamics skills through her weekly seminars and board games with her fellow labmates. She worked as a data analyst for a mobile application marketing agency for a few years before pursing an Erasmus Mundus Master's degree in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.  

Jane got her BS Physics degree in 2005. Her research involved the study of phonon thermal conductivity in superlattices. After graduation, she worked as a copy editor of physics manuscripts and a writer of electronic components and computer products articles. She then pursued a career in IT and landed an information developer/architect post for an international ERP manufacturer, where she focused on analytics solutions. Jane now works as a technical writer for government contracting and project accounting solutions.

Mignon graduated from the NIP BS Physics program in 2020. Her BS thesis research was on a computational fluid dynamics simulation of melting ice blocks. After class and lab hours, you could usually find her climbing ropes and lifting barbells at the local CrossFit box. She is now a geophysicist working for an environmental remediation firm.

Patrick graduated cum laude with a BS degree in Applied Physics in 2017. His undergraduate studies were supported by a UP Oblation Scholarship and a DOST Merit Scholarship. For his BS thesis he implemented a version of the Penna model that avoided artificial deaths. In 2015 he was also a project aide for the research project OVPAA-BPhD-2012-05. He worked briefly as an NIP Instructor and is currently a data analyst.

Robbie graduated cum laude from the BS Applied Physics program in 2017 and completed the MS Physics program in 2020. He was supported by a DOST-SEI RA 7687 Undergraduate S&T Scholarship. His research involved using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) techniques to map out the ground phase diagram of a one-dimensional extended Hubbard model from its correlation functions and entanglement entropy. Robbie was also a student assistant for the OVCRD-funded Project No. 161614 PhDIA. He is now a data scientist working for a credit and finance company.

Klarence completed her BS Chemistry and MS Physics degrees in 2018 and 2022, respectively. Her graduate studies were supported by a DOST-ASTHRDP scholarship. For her master's thesis, her research involved the investigation of thermodynamic properties of an anisotropic spin model with a quantum phase transition.

Nica graduated magna cum laude with a BS Applied Physics degree in 2018. Her work on ballistic thermal transport in graphene junctions was recognized by the College of Science as the Best BS Applied Physics Undergraduate Thesis (Leticia Shahani Award). She was supported by the UPAA of Alberta, UP Presidential, and Angelo King Scholarship grants and worked as a project staffer while a student in SanD. Nica continues her graduate studies under the Condensed Matter Physics Diploma Programme at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics.

Anjo obtained his BS Applied Physics degree in 2023. In his thesis, he explored the use of the two-dimensional Ising model to simulate the opinion dynamics of a voting population participating in a two-party election system. Outside the SanD laboratory, he works as a music producer and executive assistant for an independent game development studio. He plans to pursue a career in data science to fuel his aspiration to become a game developer.

Rayda studied the thermodynamics and transport properties of two-dimensional electron systems at low temperatures as a SanD researcher. She was also an NIP instructor and a CHED scholar. She obtained her PhD degree in 2011 and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics in Pohang, South Korea for three years. Upon her return to the Philippines in 2015 Rayda became a faculty member of the Mapúa Institute of Technology.

Lenie got her Bachelor's degree in Applied Physics in 2006. She worked for a digital content services and solutions provider as an analyst of technical and scientific documents. In 2008 she obtained a Certificate in Information Technology (Applications Development) from the UP ITTC (now ITDC). She later moved to Singapore while performing search engine optimization (SEO) tasks for several technology firms. In 2010 she joined a Singaporean retail company in a management position that handles their e-commerce strategies.

Mico obtained his Bachelor's degree in Physics magna cum laude in early 2024 with the support of DOST RA 7687 Scholarship. For his undergraduate thesis work, he simulated the spread of cells in tissues with reduced food supplies using Monte Carlo methods and agent-based modeling. He now applies his data analysis skills in the finance sector as a risk analyst.

MC received her BS Applied Physics degree in 2020. For her undergraduate research work she applied machine learning algorithms to detect polyps in colonoscopy video frames. This work was cited while she participated in a MOST GASE Summer Program last 2019. She has also interned at the Philippine Genome Center (bioinformatics) and a data science consultancy firm (GIS). She was an Erasmus Mundus scholar from 2020 to 2022, earning an MS degree tackling image processing and computer vision problems. She worked briefly for a bioinformatics project in Singapore before entering a PhD program at Leiden University.

Gene graduated from the BS Physics program in 2022 cum laude. He studied the efficiency of quantum heat engine that uses a Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick magnet as a working substance for his undergraduate thesis. He has since become a Teaching Associate and, later, an Instructor at the National Institute of Physics, where he is also pursuing an MS Physics degree.

Zach got his BS Physics degree in 2024, graduating summa cum laude. His bachelor's thesis covered the effect of cluster geometry on the localization of particles in disordered lattice systems. He developed and honed his skills in computational physics performing simulations for his research. He is currently investigating phonon interactions in chiral spin liquids as an MS Physics student and member of the Theoretical Physics Group.

Gene joined SanD in the academic year following his summer internship in 2013. He obtained his MS Physics (2016) and PhD Physics (2023) degrees with support from the DOST ASTHRD Program. For his master's thesis Gene investigated the role of disorder in topological insulators and for his PhD dissertation he studied PT-symmetry breaking in quantum walks. He has been an instructor at the National Institute of Physics and has done much simulation and modeling work for PHIVOLCS and other research projects.

Oliver obtained his BS degree in Applied Physics in 2006. Shortly after graduation, he joined a development and application support center of a North American retail company as a programmer. He has also worked as a software engineer and analyst for several international management consulting firms and information technology solutions providers. He has since moved to Kuala Lumpur where he has been a senior analyst programmer for a leading Southeast Asian financial and banking company since 2013.

Marites obtained her MS in Physics degree in 2004. She later entered the Diploma Programme of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. After completing the Diploma Programme in condensed matter physics, she continued her PhD studies at the Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands. She has since joined a high-tech equipment manufacturing company as a technical supplier engineer.