2024 APAM Senior Award Winners
Professor Marc Spiegelman, Chair of the APAM Department, presented awards to three outstanding seniors at the 2024 APAM Senior Dinner and Award Ceremony. Each winner was selected by the APAM faculty in recognition of their outstanding academic achievements.
Applied Mathematics Faculty Award Winner - Kaiwen Zhang
This year’s Applied Mathematics Faculty Award Winner, Kaiwen Zhang, is driven by a persistent interest in mathematical problems arising in real-world phenomena. He challenged himself with advanced courses, studying analytical and numerical techniques that produce precise and meaningful insights on mathematical systems. In the senior seminar, collaborating with Anna Mazhar and Siyuan Qiu, he studied cloaking in electromagnetism through the lens of inverse problems. By analyzing invariance under change-of-variable of associated PDEs and related bilinear form estimates, the team presented a scenario in which a large volume of abnormal conductivity can appear identical to a small or nonexistent volume in terms of boundary measurements. The conclusion has implications in medical imaging and resource detection. Supervised by Prof. Kui Ren, he explored stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics, designing energy functions and experimenting the balance of randomness and gradient descent in optimization algorithms using an original step-wise performance visualization tool. He has also gained interest in variational analysis in research reading mentored by Jackson Turner and supervised by Prof. Michael Weinstein. In the reading project, he investigated symmetry-breaking behavior in nonlinear time-independent Hartree equation and the underlying competition between potential energy and nonlinear energy as the solution scales in mass. Outside of school, he has gained industry exposure through internships at Deloitte Canada and Mercer China. After graduating from Columbia, he will pursue a PhD in Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, where he wishes to build on the passion he obtained at APAM, and investigate many more problems in fundamental or applied mathematics.
Applied Mathematics Faculty Award Winner - Kaiwen Zhang
Applied Physics Faculty Award Winner - Sophia Guizzo
This year's Applied Physics Faculty award winner, Sophia Guizzo, has engaged in multiple research projects within the Applied Physics department. As a sophomore, Sophia was an undergraduate researcher in the Venkataraman Group where she studied the effect of localized electric fields on chemical reactions. She has spent the last two years conducting research in the Columbia Plasma Physics Lab, where she worked on the initial design of an experiment to measure cryogenic pellet ablation with applications to fusion energy technology. More recently, Sophia leveraged computational tools to assess the effect of plasma shaping on stability in tokamak fusion reactors. Outside of research, Sophia served as a project manager of Columbia Engineers Without Borders for two years. In this role, she led a trip to Uganda to repair a solar microgrid system that powers local schools and businesses. She is also a teaching assistant for the introductory physics sequence for scientists and engineers. Sophia will be staying at Columbia as a PhD student in Applied Physics to study plasma physics with applications to fusion energy.
Applied Physics Faculty Award Winner - Sophia Guizzo
Rhodes Prize for Materials Science Winner - Kaylynn Chen
The winner of this year's Rhodes Prize for Materials Science, Kaylynn Chen, is interested in experimental quantum computing, specifically superconducting quantum computing hardware. She was involved in a summer internship at MIT's Lincoln Lab Group 89 (Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems) developing a code framework for automating the calibration of superconducting qubits and creating a simulation program for efficient software testing. At Columbia University, she worked with Professor James Hone in the Mechanical Engineering Department and Dr. Kin Chong Fong of Raytheon BBN to fabricate hybrid Van der Waals transmon qubits. Her Senior Design Project focused on performing second harmonic generation, a nonlinear optics measurement, on tungsten diselenide crystals to benchmark superconducting qubit device parameters. After graduating with a minor in computer science, she will be pursuing a PhD in Applied Physics at Yale University with plans to research quantum networking and quantum transduction.
