Bipasha Chakraborty is a research associate in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in UK. She is a theoretical particle/nuclear physicist who investigates the physics of matter and forces at its most fundamental level. She spends a good deal of her time in large-scale computer simulation to study the strong force, which binds quarks and gluons to produce visible matter. Chakraborty received her Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow in UK, where she made crucial contributions on the precision calculations of phenomenologically important quantities in the Standard Model of particle physics in a search of a more fundamental theory beyond it. During her two years of postdoctoral position at Jefferson Lab, she engaged herself in understanding the partonic structure of hadrons at large momentum transfer, and how hadrons interact in a coupled-channel scattering process to produce short-lived particle resonances. During this tenure, Chakraborty won the JSA Promising Young Scientist Prize and has been selected to participate and present at the Rising Stars in Physics workshop at MIT. She is also a recipient of INFN Postdoctoral Fellowship for Foreign Researchers, and University of Glasgow Lord Kelvin Scholarship and Gilmour Scholarship. Outside research, Chakraborty loves spending her time in teaching and STEM outreach activities to promote public science awareness and motivate young students to pursue a career in Science.
Alessandro Pilloni is a postdoctoral researcher at Jefferson Lab. He has completed his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics at the “Sapienza” University in Rome, Italy, where he was born and raised. His research interests focus on Hadron Spectroscopy, but range to several aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics. Pilloni is also member of the BaBar collaboration, and affiliated theorist to the LHCb collaboration.
Kazuhiro Watanabe received his Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics at the University of Tokyo in 2014. His doctoral thesis contributes to heavy quark production in hadronic and light-heavy ion production at collider energies. From 2014 to 2016, Watanabe worked for Institute of Particle Physics at Central China Normal University as a postdoctoral researcher. During his appointment there, he worked on small-x physics in high energy QCD. In 2016, he joined Theoretical Nuclear Physics group at Old Dominion University as a postdoctoral researcher. As his appointment was a joint postdoc position with Jefferson Lab, he also worked at the Theory Center at Jefferson Lab. Since 2018, he is working for the Theory Center at Jefferson Lab as a full-time postdoctoral researcher. Watanabe’s current research interests include topics on high energy QCD and 3D hadron/nuclear structure. In particular, he has a strong interest in TMD and GPD at various energies. Now, he is studying gluon TMD of hadron/nucleus using heavy quarkonium production.