Executive Committee

Committee Member Biographies

Wennie Wang, Past Chair

Wennie Wang is an assistant professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research group focuses on first-principles methods for understanding and harnessing materials defects in energy sustainability such as catalysis and neuromorphic computing. Wennie first joined FECS as a Member-at-Large in 2020 before transitioning to the chair line in 2021.

Yuan Zhang, Chair

Yuan Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the Old Dominion University. Her research group utilizes low temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and qPlus atomic force microscope (Q+AFM) to investigate materials electrical and mechanical properties at single atom/molecule level, and to perform molecular manipulations on surfaces for chemical reaction and novel materials properties. Yuan started serving in FECS chairline from 2023.

John Palmore, Chair-Elect

John Palmore Jr is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. His research group focuses on developing and testing numerical methods for simulating multiphase fluid flows. And the work applies this art to address engineering problems in the aerospace industry and in the environment. John joined the FECS committee as Chair-Elect in January 2024.

Nicolette Muldrow, Treasurer

Nicolette Muldrow is a Nuclear Physicist at the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, Bettis location in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. She earned her MS in Accelerator Physics at Illinois Tech in 2022 and her BS in Physics at Beloit College in 2018. Nicolette became the treasurer for FECS in 2024.

Daniel Marx, Secretary

Daniel Marx is an accelerator physicist working on the design of the new Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Prior to joining Brookhaven, he completed his graduate research at DESY research center in Hamburg, Germany. He is originally from the UK and earned his MSci in physics from Imperial College London. Daniel joined the FECS committee as Secretary in 2023.

Xuan Chen, Councilor

Xuan Chen is a postdoc in particle physics at the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education (CLASSE). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2021, and her research at Cornell focuses on developing the next-generation particle detector and search for dark matter with the data taken by the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

Andrew Seredinski, Member-at-Large

Andrew Seredinski is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. His research focuses on the electronic and optical properties of van der Waals materials with secondary interests in superconductivity and physics education. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Duke University in 2020. Andrew joined the FECS Executive Committee in 2023 as a Member-at-Large.

Tyler Van Buren, Member-at-Large

Tyler Van Buren is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Delaware.  His research group designs and studies systems that sense, respond to, and manipulate an unsteady fluid flow around them. He received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and continued on to become a Research Scholar at Princeton University. Tyler joined the FECS committee as Member-at-Large in 2023.

Kelly Luo, Member-at-Large

Kelly Luo is a Gabilan Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southern California. Her ultrafast quantum opto-spintronics group at USC studies interactions between the quantum degrees of freedom in solid-state systems such as electron spins, photons, and magnons. She was previously a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and Honorary Kavli Fellow at Cornell University after receiving her Ph.D. in Physics at the Ohio State University in 2019. Kelly Joined the FECS committee as Member-at-Large in 2024.

Ruchika Dhawan, Member-at-Large

Ruchika Dhawan is working as a Process Development Engineer for 300mm semiconductor fab at Texas Instruments Inc. She received her PhD in Applied Physics from University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in 2022, where her research focused on Silicon based micro-thermoelectric materials for microelectronic application as power management and IC cooling. Prior to joining UTD, she was an Assistant Professor in the department of Physics and Electrical Engineering at Lovely Professional University, India for five years.

Tugba Piskin, Communications Officer

Tugba obtained her Ph.D. from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, USA. After completing her doctorate, she worked as an assistant professor at Middle East Technical University in Turkey for a year, mainly focusing on teaching. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan for the last three years. Her research primarily focuses on the computational modeling of low-temperature plasma and fluid dynamics for the semiconductor industry and aerospace applications.

Deniz Aybaş Tümtürk, International Affairs Officer

Deniz Aybaş Tümtürk is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Türkiye. Her research focuses on precision magnetometry, used for new particle searches such as axion dark matter and zero-field NMR measurements. Prior to joining Bilkent, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley for two years. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in 2021, where she was a Research Assistant in the Physics Department for seven years.