PLENARY SPEAKERS

Jennifer (Jen) Dionne is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and, by courtesy, of Radiology at Stanford. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, deputy director of Q-NEXT (a DOE-funded National Quantum Initiative), and co-founder of Pumpkinseed, a company that directly sequences peptides for improved immunotherapies. From 2020-2023, Jen served as Stanford’s Inaugural Vice Provost of Shared Facilities, raising capital modernize instrumentation, fund experiential education, and support new and existing users of the shared facilities. Jen received her B.S. degrees in Physics and Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, her Ph. D. in Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology in 2009, and her postdoctoral training in Chemistry at Berkeley.  As a pioneer of nanophotonics, she is passionate about developing methods to observe and control chemical and biological processes as they unfold with nanometer scale resolution, emphasizing critical challenges in global health and sustainability. Her research has developed culture-free methods to detect pathogens and their antibiotic susceptibility; amplification-free methods to detect and sequence nucleic acids and proteins; and new methods to image light-driven chemical reactions with atomic-scale resolution. 

Her work has been recognized with the Alan T. Waterman Award, a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Moore Inventor Fellowship, the Materials Research Society Young Investigator Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and was featured on Oprah’s list of “50 Things that will make you say ‘Wow’!”.  She is especially proud of the many outstanding alumni who have graduated from her lab. Dionne lab members have received awards including HHMI, Beckman, Schmidt and Packard fellowships, and alum now hold faculty positions spanning top academia (eg, professors at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Northwestern, among others), industry (Apple, Intel, Facebook/Meta, Lockheed Martin, Pacific Biosciences, Tempus), startups (founders of Antora and Arabesque), policy (Congressional Fellows), and communications (including a Pulitzer prize winner). She also perceives outreach as a critical component of her role and frequently collaborates with visual and performing artists to convey the beauty of science to the broader public. Beyond the lab, Jen enjoys long-distance cycling, trail running, and reliving her childhood with her two young sons.

David Wiltshire is Professor at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. He obtained his PhD under the supervision of Gary Gibbons in Stephen Hawking’s group at the University of Cambridge, UK, in the mid 1980s. He held research and teaching positions at the ICTP, Trieste, Italy; the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK; and the University of Adelaide, South Australia, before returning to New Zealand in 2001. He is Fellow and a past President of the New Zealand Institute of Physics, and a past President of the Australasian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation. His research has covered black holes, higher dimensional gravity, observational and theoretical cosmology. Since the mid 2000s his particular focus has been the averaging of the inhomogeneous universe in general relativity, and implications for the problem of dark energy and the foundations of theoretical and observational cosmology. His Timescape cosmology, formulated in 2007, revisits these foundations with falsifiable predictions.

Kei May Lau is a Research Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST).  She received her degrees from the University of Minnesota and Rice University and served as a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst before joining HKUST in year 2000. Lau is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of IEEE, Optica (formerly OSA), and the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences. She was also a recipient of the IPRM award, IET J J Thomson medal for Electronics, Optica Nick Holonyak Jr. Award, IEEE Photonics Society Aron Kressel Award, and Hong Kong Croucher Senior Research Fellowship. She was an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices and Electron Device Letters, an Associate Editor for the Journal of Crystal Growth and Applied Physics Letters.

Nicolas Regnault is a CNRS research director at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and a visiting researcher at Princeton University. He did his PhD thesis on integrable models for gravity and then moved to condensed matter. He is a renowned expert in the fractional quantum Hall physics, especially its numerical aspects, topological phases of matter, entanglement properties in many-body quantum states and out-of-equilibrium quantum systems.

Elisabetta Barberio was born in a mountainous region of Calabria, Italy, and grew up in a village on the La Sila mountainous plateau.

Her studies took her round the world, completing her Laurea (the Italian version of the Bachelor’s degree) in Bologna, her PhD in Germany, and a Koshland fellowship at the Wizmann Institute in Israel.

Before undertaking a role at The University of Melbourne in 2004, Professor Barberio played an important role in the groundbreaking discovery of the Higgs Boson particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics.

At CERN, she performed measurements that confirmed the theory describing fundamental particles’ behaviour to an extraordinary degree of precision.

In 2018 Professor Barberio was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Walter Boas Medal of the Australian Physical Institute.

She has continued to be a trailblazer in the field of physics, initiating the first direct detection dark matter program in Australia and the construction of the first underground laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere, the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory.

She is also at the helm of the SABRE South experiment – Australia’s first dark matter direct detection experiment that aims to solve one of the great mysteries of the universe – the nature of dark matter.

As Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, Professor Barberio leads a team of dark matter researchers from The University of Melbourne, The University of Adelaide, Swinburne University of Technology, Australian National University, The University of Sydney and The University of Western Australia, alongside national and international partners.

In this position, she is committed to nurturing a more diverse and inclusive scientific community of the future and bringing the joy and excitement of science to communities across Australia.

The SABRE South experiment

Professor Barberio is leading is the SABRE (Sodum Iodide with Active Background Rejection Experiment) South experiment.

This is Australia’s first major dark matter direct detection experiment and comprises a huge steel vessel encasing some of the world’s most pure crystals, which are being specially-made for the project.

It will be located 1km underground in the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory in Stawell Gold Mines. Its location aims to reduce interference from cosmic radiation.

The experiment mirrors the SABRE experiment at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, which has been taking data for almost 30 years.

The Australian experiment will help researchers determine the impact of seasonal modulation on potential dark matter signals to confirm or refute the results of the SABRE project in the Northern Hemisphere.

The experiment, helmed by Professor Barberio, is expected to start taking data by the end of the year.

More information on the SABRE South experiment is available at: https://www.sabre-experiment.org.au/