2025

Harry Westfahl Jr.

CNPEM - Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials

Areas: Advanced Synchrotron Instrumentation, Condensed Matter Physics

Harry Westfahl is the director of the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) at the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), a position he has held since 2020. He earned his PhD in physics from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, where he completed his undergraduate studies.

After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Ames Laboratory of the US Department of Energy, he joined LNLS as a researcher in 2001. Harry has held several leadership roles at LNLS, including Scientific Director (2013–2019) and Deputy Scientific Director (2011–2012). Since 2013, he has led the design and construction of the beamlines for Sirius, Brazil’s fourth-generation synchrotron light source. His research interests are focused on condensed matter physics and the development of advanced synchrotron instrumentation, contributing to advancements in beamline optics, detectors and experimental techniques.

2025

WebAssign Engineering Team

Cengage Group, Inc

Areas: Education, Mathematics Courseware Design

WebAssign began in 1997 at North Carolina State University as an early online homework platform for physics students. Over time, the technology grew into its own company, eventually providing online homework for millions of students globally.

In 2008, WebAssign took a major step forward by adding symbolic math to its homework system and chose Wolfram as its technology partner. Wolfram’s computational engine enabled real-time evaluation of student answers for accurate grading.

After Cengage acquired WebAssign in 2016, Wolfram technology became deeply integrated across a wide range of textbooks. Today, approximately 1.1 million WebAssign questions use Wolfram Language for instant grading and intelligent feedback. These textbooks span areas like algebra, pre-calculus, calculus, differential equations and statistics.

2025

Aninda Sinha

Indian Institute of Science, India
University of Calgary, Canada

Areas: cosmology, Mathematical Physics, Quantum Field Theory, String Theory

Aninda Sinha is a theoretical high-energy physicist. His research focuses on quantum field theory, string theory, cosmology and mathematical physics.

Sinha’s research is both numerical and analytical in nature and makes heavy use of the capabilities of Mathematica. He has used Mathematica as a “theoretical experimentalist” in many of his 80 publications. His research on the bootstrap makes heavy use of the symbolic manipulation capabilities as well as the high-precision numerical capabilities of Mathematica. Recently, he found an infinite number of new formulas for pi in a paper that was published in Physical Review Letters, which was selected by Scientific American as one of the seven coolest mathematical discoveries of 2024. Mathematica provided a versatile platform to verify these results and to gain fresh, new perspectives on string theory.

2025

Gareth Russell

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Areas: Conservation Biology, Ecology

Gareth Russell is a computational ecologist and conservation biologist, focusing on spatial and movement ecology. He started using Mathematica at Version 4, mainly for population modeling, and expanded his use as its capabilities have grown. Currently he uses it to build and fit statistical models of animal movement in complex real-world landscapes, which also requires the processing of geospatial movement tracks and the processing and sampling of remotely sensed data layers.

From the beginning Gareth also brought Mathematica into his teaching, from complete graduate courses in computational ecology and statistics to course modules on epidemiology to general education labs that introduce freshmen to chaos, fractals and other amazing phenomena. For a while he ran a self-hosted webMathematica site that provided free tools for doing common basic calculations in conservation biology. Recently he has been experimenting with building specialized CNNs for separation of certain hard-to-distinguish species encountered during biodiversity surveys.

2025

Martin Ricker

Instituto de Biología Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

Areas: Applied Statistics, Forest Science

Martin Ricker studied biology at the University of Würzburg in Germany, followed by his doctoral research at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Science. Since 1995, he has worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Biology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City to develop methods and knowledge for management and conservation of species-rich tropical forests. He has been an enthusiastic user of Mathematica since 1991, when he purchased for the first time the software for his doctoral studies, using it for analyses of databases, generation of graphs, regression and statistical analyses, as well as explorations with calculus. Over the years, a number of Mathematica notebooks have been published together with scientific articles about topics as varied as solving linear regression without skewness of the residuals’ distribution, statistical age determination of tree rings and a generalization of the exponential function to model growth. Currently, he is working with Mathematica on articles about generalized multivariate analysis of variance (GMANOVA), the numerical calculation of the inverse of the exponential integral Ei(x), and modeling tree growth curves indirectly with piecewise linear regression when tree ages are unknown.

2025

Nathan Myrhvold

Intellectual Ventures

Areas: 3D Printing, Asteroids, Biostatistics, Computer Science, Global Health & Development, Image and Signal Processing, Image Processing, Nuclear Energy, Paleontology, Planetary Science, Statistics, Theoretical Physics

Dr. Nathan Myhrvold is a prominent scientist, technologist, inventor, author and food photographer. In a 14-year tenure at Microsoft, Myhrvold led advanced technology and business development groups, founded Microsoft Research, managed an R&D budget of $2 billion and served as the company’s chief strategist and chief technology officer. Myhrvold previously had cofounded Dynamical Systems Research, a software company, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, where his research with Professor Stephen Hawking centered on quantum theories of gravitation. Myhrvold has published peer-reviewed research in planetary science, paleontology and climate science.

In 2000, after retiring from Microsoft, Myhrvold founded Intellectual Ventures (IV), which he leads as CEO and one of its most prolific inventors, with more than 850 US patents awarded. Myhrvold is vice chairman of TerraPower, a pioneer in advanced nuclear energy. He also has served as an adviser to startup companies that IV has launched to commercialize advanced metamaterials technologies.

Myhrvold is the author of seven Modernist Cuisine culinary and photography books and pioneer of innovative photography techniques and equipment. His most recent landscape photography book Natural Wonders is published by National Geographic and is on sale now.

Myhrvold holds a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics, as well as a master’s degree in mathematical economics, from Princeton University. His master’s degree in geophysics and space physics, as well as his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, are from the University of California, Los Angeles.

2025

Thomas Landsberger

ENODA Ltd

Areas: Energy & Sustainability, Software

Thomas Landsberger, Dipl.Ing., MSc, is an engineering leader whose innovative use of Wolfram Language has reshaped how complex control systems are modeled and implemented at ENODA. With a background in electrical and control engineering; over 20 years of software experience, including at Microsoft; and an additional degree in economics, Thomas brings a rare interdisciplinary perspective to solving high-impact technical challenges.

At ENODA, Thomas played a key role in developing the ENODA PRIME® Exchanger, a first-of-its-kind dynamic power-flow technology designed to replace traditional grid transformers, increase distribution capacity and enable large-scale decentralized renewable generation. Faced with the complexity of accurately modeling and controlling the system’s 12-coil, 12-degree-of-freedom architecture, he used Wolfram Language to derive control algorithms from first principles and build a code-generation workflow that ensures faithful, verifiable firmware implementation on real-time hardware, avoiding the risks of manual equation handling and translation to C.

Originally adopting Wolfram Language for advanced computational geometry problems in 3D-printing software development, Thomas has since become a driving force in expanding its use across ENODA. He has promoted Wolfram-based methods in research spanning physics, electrical engineering and signal processing, and organized training to embed Wolfram capabilities within the wider technical team. His ongoing work includes streamlining Wolfram Language-to-C/C++ deployment for real-time systems and developing tools that integrate Wolfram Language models with MATLAB/Simulink circuit simulations.

2025

Gabriel Landi

Associate professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Rochester, NY

Areas: Energy Harvesting Devices, Open Quantum Systems, Quantum Computing, Quantum Sensing, Quantum Thermodynamics, Transport and Metrology

Gabriel T. Landi is an associate professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Rochester, where he directs the Quantum Thermodynamics and Quantum Transport group (QT2). He also serves as an associate editor of Physical Review Research. Professor Landi’s research sits at the crossroads of quantum information science, open quantum systems and non-equilibrium statistical physics. He is particularly recognized for his work in quantum thermodynamics and quantum transport: developing theoretical frameworks that reformulate thermodynamic laws in the quantum-coherent regime, analyzing quantum stochastic processes and investigating how coherence and fluctuations influence energy, entropy and information in small and strongly-coupled quantum systems. His interests span theory of open quantum systems, quantum stochastic processes, quantum information theory and quantum metrology. A distinctive aspect of Professor Landi’s contributions is his design and deployment of a specialized computational framework built in Mathematica: the Melt library. Melt is a fully self-contained Mathematica notebook/package developed under his direction with the QT2 group, which provides users with a high-level yet transparent environment for simulating and analyzing open quantum systems, quantum information measures, Gaussian states, full-counting statistics and more. In his current role, he leads the QT2 research group, which applies advanced methods of quantum trajectories, full‐counting statistics and stochastic thermodynamics to explore fundamental questions (e.g., how irreversibility emerges at the quantum level) and to propose novel applications—including quantum sensing, thermal machines, energy harvesting at the nanoscale and quantum transport devices. Professor Landi’s work has gained widespread recognition in the community. His group publishes regularly in leading journals and is frequently invited to contribute to seminars and workshops on quantum thermodynamics and transport. He is also committed to mentoring the next generation of researchers and to advancing the theoretical foundations of quantum nonequilibrium physics.

2025

Thomas Hahn

Max-Planck-Institut für Physik

Areas: Computational Physics, Package Development, Physics, Quantum Field Theory

Thomas Hahn is a department leader at the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He is also on the executive committee for the Fachgruppe Computeralgebra (Subject Group in Computer Algebra). He is the author of numerous packages for performing calculations in quantum field theory, including FeynArts, one of the most highly cited Mathematica packages to date. He has applied his expertise to the study of high-energy computational physics and is personally an author of over one hundred scholarly works in this field.

2025

Elamin Elbasha

Merck & Co., Inc.

Areas: Economics, Epidemiology, Mathematical Modeling

Elamin Elbasha, PhD, MA, is the executive director of Health Economic and Decision Sciences at Merck Research Laboratories (MRL), USA. He leads a team that assesses the value of vaccines and drugs to prevent and treat infectious diseases through mathematical models and synthesis of data. Before 2018, he was a distinguished scientist at MRL.

Dr. Elbasha’s research expertise includes theoretical and applied approaches to economic analysis and mathematical modeling of diseases. His research includes analyzing vaccines against diseases of great public health importance such as HPV, HIV, varicella, rotavirus, CMV, hepatitis (A, B and C), RSV and pneumococcal infections.

Dr. Elbasha obtained his PhD in applied economics from the University of Minnesota and has over 25 years of post-graduate research experience in the public and the pharmaceutical sector. He made several presentations at scientific meetings and has authored or coauthored numerous scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Journal of Mathematical Biology, Pharmacoeconomics and Vaccine. Dr. Elbasha is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Society for Medical Decision Making, and International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). He also serves on the advisory board of the journal of Mathematical Biosciences and editorial board of the journal Medical Decision Making. He enjoys playing soccer and spending time with his family.

2025

Mahn-Soo Choi

Professor of Physics / Department of Physics, Korea University
School of Quantum, Korea University

Areas: Quantum Computing, Quantum Information, Theoretical Physics

Mahn-Soo Choi is a professor of physics at Korea University in South Korea and holds a PhD in physics from POSTECH in 1998. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Basel in Switzerland and a research fellowship at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Faculty of Physics at Korea University in 2002.
Choi’s research interests have evolved from his doctoral dissertation in condensed matter theory to encompass quantum computation and quantum information. His areas of expertise include quantum algorithms, quantum simulations, superconducting qubits, spin qubits in quantum dots and circuit quantum electrodynamics in quantum hybrid systems, as well as mesoscopic transport.

In the early 2000s, Choi initiated the development of Mathematica packages specifically designed for students studying quantum many-body systems and quantum spin systems. His primary objective was to assist students in prioritizing essential physics concepts over technical calculations. These packages eventually evolved into Q3, a symbolic quantum simulation framework implemented in Wolfram Language. Q3 was released to the public in 2020 through a GitHub repository and was subsequently featured in his recent book published by Springer titled A Quantum Computation Workbook.

2025

Qing-Hong Cao

Peking University

Areas: Physics Education, Quantum Mechanics, Top Quark Phenomenology

Qinghong Cao is a leading Chinese theoretical physicist, currently serving as vice dean of the School of Physics at Peking University, where he also holds the title of Boya Distinguished Professor, one of the highest academic honors awarded by Peking University for exceptional contributions to research and teaching. He is a recipient of the prestigious Outstanding Young Scientist Fund from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. His research focuses primarily on particle physics phenomenology— investigating the origin of mass, mechanisms of symmetry breaking, perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and potential signals of new physics at the TeV scale, often in close connection with cosmological phenomena.

Professor Cao has been using Mathematica since his undergraduate studies and continues to integrate it into his teaching of advanced courses such as quantum mechanics and particle physics. His textbook Quantum Mechanics has been selected as a 101 Physics Project Core Textbook in China, reflecting its national significance in physics education. In addition to his expertise in theoretical physics, Professor Cao is actively engaged in exploring the interdisciplinary integration of artificial intelligence and physics. His work spans textbook development, pedagogical innovation and the cultivation of top-tier talent—particularly within the evolving context of the AI era.

2025

Sheldon Axler

Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, San Francisco State University

Areas: Education, Mathematics, Package Development, Publishing and Authoring

Sheldon Axler is professor emeritus at the San Francisco State University Department of Mathematics. He has served over 15 years in leadership roles as the Mathematics Department Chair and Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University. He has also held faculty positions at Michigan State University, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, Indiana University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has authored numerous excellent texts on college and graduate mathematics, including Linear Algebra Done Right, Harmonic Function Theory, College Algebra and many others. He has authored a Mathematica package for harmonic function theory calculations as well as over a hundred scholarly works in mathematics.