Archives: Speakers

Dr. Stephen Gourlay was formerly a Senior Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), retiring from the Lab in 2017. He started his career as an experimental particle physicist at Fermilab but soon moved into the field of superconducting magnets as project physicist for the new low beta insertions for the Tevatron. In 1995 he led the Superconducting Magnet Group at Fermilab, working on the design of IR quadrupoles for the Large Hadron Collider. After a year as a Scientific Associate at CERN he moved to LBNL in 1997 where he served as head of the high field magnet R&D program and was Director of the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division for 8 years. From its inception in 2003 until 2006, he headed the magnet activities of the DOE LHC Accelerator Research Program that produced the magnet technology now used for the LHC Hi-Lumi upgrade. In 2015 he led the creation of the US Magnet Development Program and became its first director. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and served on the Executive Committee of the APS-Division of Physics of Beams and as Chair in 2016. He was a member of the ASC Board from 1998 – 2016 and served as chair of ASC 2012.

Dr. Judy Wu is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Kansas. She received her PhD from the University of Houston. She is an experimental condensed matter physicist and is specialized in fabrication, characterization and device applications of thin films and nanostructures. Her current research focuses on understanding the interfaces in superconducting nanocomposite films, ultrathin metal-insulator-metal tunnel junctions including Josephson tunnel junctions, magnetic tunnel junctions, memristors, and in graphene-based heterostructures nanohybrids quantum sensors. Judy Wu was elected to the ASC board in 2002 and has served on ASC technical committee since then.

Dr. Marissa Giustina joined Google’s quantum computing research effort in 2016 and currently leads the device packaging effort as a Staff Research Scientist and Quantum Electronics Engineer. Prior to Google, Dr. Giustina worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, where she designed, built, and published a “loophole-free” experiment testing Bell’s inequality using entangled optical photons and superconducting optical TES detectors.

Dr. Caroline Kilbourne is a senior scientist in the X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where she’s been developing low-temperature microcalorimeters for high-resolution x-ray spectroscopy since arriving as a post-doc in 1992. She began researching microcalorimeters in 1987 when, as a Stanford graduate student, she adapted NASA thermistor-based calorimeters to a hard x-ray, inelastic scattering experiment by coupling them to thick Sn x-ray absorbers. She came to Goddard Space Flight Center as a National Research Council associate in 1992, and she joined the permanent staff in 1995. Her responsibilities at Goddard have ranged from advanced detector development at the sensor level to optimizing the myriad systems and their interfaces needed to progress from a promising sensor technology to a robust, space-worthy spectrometer.  In 2022 she was awarded a NASA Distinguished Service Medal for her mission-enabling developments.

Dr. Kilbourne is presently an instrument scientist for the XRISM/Resolve x-ray spectrometer, which is readying for launch in a year. She is also a co-investigator on the Athena/X-IFU spectrometer and is actively involved in developing future mission concepts. She is looking forward to applying these milli-Kelvin sensors to a wide range of detailed investigations of the mega-Kelvin, x-ray-emitting Universe.