Faculty

Brandon R. Brown pursued doctoral training in superconductivity, with postdoctoral work in science communication. Once at USF, he shifted his research focus to sensory biophysics. He and his collaborators and students explored the electric sense of sharks, skates, and rays. Brandon served as associate dean for sciences, during which time the university completed planning stages for the Lo Schiavo Center for Science and Innovation, for which he helped fundraising efforts. He currently writes...

Professor Camblong's research has been centered on miscellaneous topics in quantum field theory, gravitational physics, and many-body theory. His main focus has been on developing general frameworks, with applications to fields as diverse as condensed-matter physics, molecular physics, nuclear physics, elementary particle physics, and quantum gravity. Some of the highlights of his published research over the past decade include collaborative work on: a geometrical and gauge-invariant approach to...

Marcelo F. Camperi is the former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He studied physics at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata, in Argentina. He received his PhD from Boston University in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, working in topological field theory and some phenomenology of elementary particles. Upon graduating, he became interested in the study of the brain from a physicists' point of view. Other interests also include computational physics, mathematical physics, and in...

I am excited about using high-precision control of light to create and control extremely brief pulses of electrons! My main tools are ultrafast lasers and field emission tips. Much of my earlier graduate work concentrated on improving the exquisite control of light fields achieved by the optical clock and ultrafast laser communities.

With undergraduate research students at USF, we investigate the ultrafast field emission process. Students have designed, built, and characterized femtosecond...

Xiaosheng Huang leads a research team, with mostly undergraduate students, that has found the largest number of strong gravitational lens candidates using cutting-edge machine learning techniques. He leads large-scale observation programs for high resolution and spectroscopic confirmation of these candidates. His team has also developed the fastest lens modeling code, GIGA-Lens. He is the PI and Co-I of a number of significant programs on the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space...

Milka Nikolic's research focuses primarily on developing spectroscopy methods for plasma etching and cleaning technologies. She is interested in both theoretical and experimental approaches to solving mysteries of plasma physics. In particular, Milka works in combining various numerical methods with widely used optical emission spectroscopy technique to obtain fundamental plasma properties. Understanding these properties plays an important role in surface modification processes.

Undergraduate...

Aparna Venkatesan is an astronomer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of San Francisco, and co-Director of USF's Tracy Seeley Center for Teaching Excellence. She works on studies of the first stars and quasars in the universe, and on numerous cultural astronomy and space policy projects. She also serves as co-Chair of the American Astronomical Society's Committee to Protect Astronomy and the Space Environment (COMPASSE). Dr. Venkatesan has been recognized...

Kathryn Kooistra is an adjunct professor in the physics department and her primary interest is in astronomy. She grew up in New Jersey and moved out to San Francisco to pursue her Masters in 2016. In addition to teaching, she also gives shows at the California Academy of Sciences, where she presents on everything from comets to black holes.

Heiko Lemke was educated at the University of Giessen, Germany. His focus there and at the Jülich Research Center was applied physics and scientific instrumentation for scanning tunneling and magnetic force microscopy. His PhD studies led him to research thin magnetic films of the ternary Nd2Fe14B alloy and their application in micro-technology. He continued researching aspects of his PhD subject as a post-doc at UC Berkeley.

His venture into private industry was as the lead engineer in a...

Aaron White is an adjunct professor focusing on science education and outreach, with specialties in physics and astronomy. He’s worked as a science communicator at several museums, produced and hosted science videos for Youtube, been a panelist at Comicon, and done science advising for video games. 

His graduate thesis investigated new approaches for teaching undergraduates cosmology, and how to integrate multimedia tools into instruction. Previous projects involved refining our understanding...