Geronimo Allan Jerome Acosta

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.

Joanne Mae Adelino

Joanne obtained her Bachelor's degree in Applied Physics, graduating magna cum laude in 2020. She was supported by a DOST-SEI Junior Level Science Scholarship. Her research involved studying different characteristics of classical and quantum reversible circuits and implementation of quantum algorithms. She obtained a Master's degree in Meteorology in 2022 as an MS Graduate Fellow of DOST-PAGASA, where she now uses numerical models for weather forecasting.

Allan Alinea

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.

Anthony Amarra

Anthony obtained his BS Physics degree in 2009. After graduating from UP Diliman, he attended the University of Southampton where he completed the Master of Science program in Sound and Vibration Studies last 2011. He then moved to Toronto where he works as an analyst for a Canadian consulting firm that specializes in providing sound solutions for land use planning, architectural applications, and other acoustical problems.

Sheenah Ancheta

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.

Paul Daniel Ang

Danna finished the BS Applied Physics (Materials Physics) program magna cum laude in 2018 and was supported by a DOST-SEI Merit Scholarship. Danna's research involved developing methods to study the elastic and piezoelectric properties of hexagonal crystals with the Quantum ESPRESSO software package. Danna later pursued graduate studies in numerical weather and climate modeling, obtaining an MS degree in Meteorology from the UPD Institute of Environmental Science and Meteorology in 2021. Danna is now a science research specialist at the Philippine Space Agency.

Kristine Eia Antonio

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.

Cleofe Ayang-ang

Clei completed her Bachelor's degree in Applied Physics in 2018 and Master's degree in Physics in 2020. She worked on molecular dynamics simulations of bulk metallic glasses for a year before turning her attention to the study of quantum spin chains. Her research involved calculating several entanglement measures on a Kitaev chain with long-range interactions and analyzing its quantum critical behavior. She obtained her MS Physics degree from the NIP in 2020 with support from the DOST-ASTHRD Program. She is currently a data analyst for a management consultancy company.

Carlos Baldo III

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.

Binladin Balt

Ben earned his BS Physics degree in 2018, with his research on disordered XY spin chains being cited as a Leticia Shahani Awardee for Best BS Physics Undergraduate Thesis. He studied the effect of a random transverse field on the correlation functions of the XY model. 

 

Rona Barbarona

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.

Francis Bayocboc, Jr.

Francis completed his MS Physics degree in 2015 as a DOST-ASTHRDP scholar. His MS research work has been presented in conferences in Kyoto and Stellenbosch as part of the OVCRD-funded Project No. 141420 PhDIA. He was a faculty member at the UPLB Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Physics for two years before attending the University of Queensland where he obtained his PhD degree in 2021. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Marian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Maria Donna Beech

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.

Karla Belisario-Rivero

Karla obtained her MS Physics degree in 2007 with the support of a PCASTRD-DOST graduate scholarship. She used molecular dynamics simulations to model reacting chemical species for her MS thesis. She has been an instructor for the College of Science and Mathematics (CSM) of Western Mindanao State University (WMSU) in Zamboanga City since 1998. Karla is among the first advanced physics degree holders of the CSM faculty and has actively worked for the CHEd accreditation of WMSU's physics programs. She is now pursuing a PhD degree in Physics at the University of San Carlos.

Marc Jason Bunagan

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.

Jairus Calpatura

Jairus graduated with a BS Applied Physics degree in early 2021. His undergraduate thesis was on the thermoelectric effect and he studied how the amount of heat in a solid changes with applied electric fields and the intrinsic properties of the material. Jairus has since worked as a full-stack software engineer working on web, data engineering, and blockchain applications. He was active in the local music scene through the UP Music Circle and his band Granny Lee, and continues his involvement by helping to produce shows and events.

Raymart Canoy

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.

Micielle Capili

Micielle defended her MS thesis on Monte Carlo studies of critical percolating systems last 2012. During her MS studies she tutored students in science and mathematics and later also worked for a quality management company as an ISO consultant. Shortly after receiving her MS degree, Micielle was appointed as a university RA for SanD and held that position until 2013. She currently resides in Winnipeg where she is pursuing a career in physics education.

Criswelynn Castro

Cris obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 2007. In the years following her graduation, she has been a senior software developer for an IT firm that supplies integrated general insurance software to its customers. She now applies her expertise in SQL databases as a systems architect for one of the Philippines' top medical centers.

Marc Jerrone Castro

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.

Meliton Chiong III

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. He is currently a PhD student at the Department of Precision Engineering of Osaka University.

Richmond Co

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.

Nicholas Colina

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.

April Cortez

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 Daquioag

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.

Tristan de Guzman

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.

Kryzz Joshua de Leon

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.

Leon Sergio Dela Cruz

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.

Rafael dela Rosa

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.

Agatha de la Torre

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.

Krishna Lyn Delima

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.  

Raphael Dimacali

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. 

Jane Dizon-Nombres

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.

Joshua Gregor Dizon

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.

Mignon Frances Dumanjog

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.

Maria Alena Edora

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.

Christopher Patrick Elegado

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.

Faye Espalmado

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.

Robertson Esperanza

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.

Ian Felismino

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.

Klarence Feri

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.

Zed Harold Fernandez

Zed obtained his BS Applied Physics degree in 2017 with the support of a DOST-SEI RA 7687 Undergraduate S&T Scholarship. He was also a student assistant for the OVCRD-funded Project No. 141420 PhDIA. For his undergraduate research he used molecular dynamics simulations to evaluate the metallic glass forming ability of a copper-silver alloy. He is now a senior high school physics instructor in Bacolod City.

Nica Jane Ferrer

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.

Razel Flores Austria

Razel completed the BS Applied Physics program of NIP in 2006. She has previously worked in Dubai for an international government services provider and for the Dubai Metro. She later returned to the Philippines and has since been an analyst for an international content management services company.

Jose Antonio Gamboa

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 Gammag

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.

Jersey Dianne Ganding

Jersey graduated cum laude from the BS Applied Physics program in 2021. Her research work investigated the critical behavior of magnetic models of varying dimensions. She is now a practicing data engineer and uses her skills to provide organizations with complex data analysis and help them make data-driven decisions.

Lenie Garcia

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.

Oliver Generalao

Oliver completed the MS Physics program in 2017 with the support of the DOST ASTHRD Program. His graduate research focused on speeding up density functional theory software on unsupported commodity GPU hardware. He obtaind his BS Degree in Physics from MSU-IIT and has had previous work experience in the semiconductor and BPO industries. He is currently a senior high school instructor in San Juan.

Michael Nicholas Go

Mike completed his Bachelor's degree in Applied Physics in 2019. His undergraduate thesis focused on determining higher order periods of solutions to the logistic equation using a Chebyshev spectral decomposition. Mike served the College of Science Student Council for two years as the National Institute of Physics Representative and as a Councilor. During his free time, Mike does photography and plays football. He is currently studying medicine at the University of the East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center.

Mary Chris Go

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.

Jacob Gomez

Jacob graduated from the BS Applied Physics program in 2020 as a DOST Merit scholar. For his undergraduate research thesis, he performed molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the break up of colliding clusters of silica dust. Jacob's work on this topic stemmed from his keen interest in astronomy and he has been an active member of the UP Astronomical Society. In 2022 he entered the MS Agrometeorology program of the University of the Philippines Los Baños.

Gene Herman

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 is currently a Teaching Associate at the National Institute of Physics, where he is also pursuing an MS Physics degree.

Mary Joyce Hernal

Joyce obtained her MS degree in physics in 2009 studying percolation in different two-dimensional geometries. She worked for STI College Caloocan while completing the MS program and for a few more years thereafter. Since 2013 she has been a full-time lecturer at the Far Eastern University in Manila. She is also a content writer for an educational publishing company.

Stephanie Ibo Batac

Steph obtained her BS Applied Physics degree in 2007. She has worked as a mainframe programmer for a Filipino information technology company that provides integrated services for corporate clients. She now develops applications for the information technology department of a financial services and insurance provider.

Gene Itable

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.

Naomi Jane Jacosalem

Naomi was a university RA for SanD in 2008 and she completed the MS program in the same year. Her research in SanD involved numerical studies of the bound and scattering states of particles in various well-in-a-well potentials. After graduation, she joined an information technology services provider in Cebu City. She was later deployed to Yokohama for a few years to develop software applications for a multinational computer technology client. She is now taking her PhD in Physics at the MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology.

Christian Oliver Jaramillo

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.

Sarah Johnson

Sarah graduated from the NIP BS Physics program in 2003 and the MS Physics program in 2009. As an undergraduate, she was supported by a DOST-SEI scholarship. While completing her graduate research on migrating particles, she briefly worked as an NIP teaching assistant before joining the faculty of the Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics (DPSM) of UP Manila in 2005. Sarah is now an assistant professor of the DPSM and plays an active role in developing its Bachelor's program in health physics.

Marites Labora

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.