March 26
Navigating Research Careers Outside Academia
Panel:
- David Ball (Project Canary),
- Arpi Grigorian (Southwest Research Institute),
- Jeremy Scnittman (NASA GSFC),
- Gabriele Bozzola (Amazon Center for Quantum Computing)
Abstract: What can you actually do with a physics or astronomy degree? Whether you're just starting your undergraduate journey or finishing a postdoc, the toolkit you're building is more versatile than you might think. Join the next BANG seminar for a deep dive into how research-oriented skills translate into high-impact careers across the private and public sectors. We've invited four panelists with physics and astronomy backgrounds to share their journeys into:
- Quantum computing at Amazon
- Astrophysics research at NASA Goddard
- Detecting methane emissions at a climate data and analysis company
- R&D at a research institute.
Come to learn about research-adjacent career paths outside of academia that fit your interests. The panelists will share their experiences, advice, and take questions from the audience.
Stay tuned: this is part one of BANG's career series! Join us again on April 9 for a look at career paths that move entirely beyond the research world.
Speaker Bios:
David Ball is the lead applied scientist at Project Canary, where he develops algorithms for detecting and quantifying methane emissions at oil and gas facilities and landfills. He holds a PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Arizona (2020), where he simulated plasma dynamics around black holes using magnetohydrodynamic and particle-in-cell methods. Before joining Project Canary, he worked at Arete and Descartes Labs applying machine learning to remote sensing data, including multispectral imagery and synthetic aperture radar.
Arpi Grigorian is currently an Analyst at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, TX. He got his Bachelor's and Master's in Physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was an undergraduate research assistant at NIST Boulder, where he helped develop and test the focal plane of several Cosmic Microwave Background telescopes. For his graduate research, he studied simulations of black hole accretion flows and compared synthetic images from those simulations to observations of Sagittarius A*. Arpi is passionate about fostering LGBTQ+ spaces in STEM; he has helped build LGBTQ+ community both while a student and an industry professional. At SwRI, Arpi supports research and development projects for a variety of customers. He can provide advice for students interested in careers in defense and classified R&D.
Jeremy Schnittman: is a Research Astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where he has been a civil servant since 2010. Jeremy's research interests run the gamut from black holes and gravitational waves, to planetary dynamics and resonance, to the habitability of exoplanets. His day-to-day work includes pencil-and-paper theory, writing codes for high performance computers, defining requirements for future NASA missions, writing proposals, supervising students, and attending telecons.
Gabriele Bozzola: I am an Applied Scientist at the Amazon Center for Quantum Computing. I develop tools and techniques to design and simulate quantum chips that support our mission to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Prior to joining Amazon, I was a Senior (Scientific) Software Engineer for the CliMA project at Caltech, where I contributed to developing robust and accurate open-source models for climate modeling in Julia. My background is computational physics. I obtained my PhD at the Astronomy Department at The University of Arizona, where I was a NASA Future Investigator for Space Sciences and a Frontera Fellow. I worked with Vasilis Paschalidis on various topics in gravitational physics. My research was awarded the 2024 Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics.
PSC 1136 & Zoom link
BANG! Organizers:
Matt Lastovka (he/him)
Jacob Vider (he/him)