Speakers

Mary Convery is the director of the Beams Division at Fermilab, focusing on operations planning and performance of the accelerator complex.  She is also the deputy project director for facilities for the LBNF/DUNE-US project.  In this role she oversees the design and construction of the conventional facilities and beamline at Fermilab.  She has a PhD in high-energy physics from Case Western Reserve University.

Seongyeol Kim earned a PhD in Physics from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in August 2021, with a thesis on electron beam manipulation for the beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerators. Then, he joined the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator Group (AWA) at Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoc. His work focused on the control and manipulation of electron beam phase spaces for high-gradient, high-efficiency advanced accelerators. In addition, he participated in several collaborative projects such as AI/ML-based phase space reconstruction with SLAC, bunch shaping using a multi-leaf collimator and emittance exchange beamline with UCLA, and X-band transverse deflecting cavity-based longitudinal bunch shaping with Euclid Techlabs. Since September 2023, he has been working as a staff scientist at the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory X-ray Free Electron Laser (PAL-XFEL) facility. His current work involves studying the electron beam dynamics for high-brightness XFEL and operating the machine for user services. His research interests include novel beam diagnostics and optimization of the beam and FEL using artificial-intelligence, machine-learning (AI/ML) techniques.

Aaron Liberman is pursuing his PhD in laser-wakefield acceleration under the supervision of Prof. Victor Malka at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His research focuses on manipulating a laser’s spacetime structure to overcome the dephasing limit and achieve higher electron energies. Aaron’s research has featured in several peer-reviewed journals, has been solicited at leading conferences, and has been presented at invited seminar talks. His IMPALA spatio-spectral laser diagnostic was named one of the optics breakthroughs of 2024 by Optics and Photonics News. Aaron received a 2025 SPIE Optics and Photonics Scholarship, the Best Student Paper Award at the 2025 SPIE Optics and Optoelectronics Conference, and the Weizmann AMOS Best Talk Award. Prior to Weizmann, Aaron earned his BA in Physics and Mathematics, magna cum laude, from Columbia University, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and received Columbia’s Leadership and Excellence Award among other awards and fellowship.

Masashi Otani is an Associate Professor at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Kyoto University, where he worked on the long-baseline neutrino experiment T2K. He then gained further experience in underground neutrino experiments at the Research Center for Neutrino Science, Tohoku University. Since 2013, he has been conducting research at KEK on muon acceleration and its applications, and since 2017 he has also been involved in studies using the high-intensity proton accelerator complex at J-PARC. He currently leads the development of the world’s first muon linear accelerator for the J-PARC Muon g-2/EDM experiment.

Prof. Ulrich Schramm’s research focuses on the manipulation and control of particle beams with laser light, starting in the early 1990s with laser cooling of stored ion beams in Heidelberg and Munich. With the advent of CPA TW lasers his interest shifted to the new field of laser plasma accelerators. Since 2011 he is director of the Institute of Radiation Physics at HZDR Dresden, operating the center for high power radiation sources which includes two Petawatt laser systems. With the Dresden team he performed benchmarking experiments towards application readiness of plasma accelerators, comprising the dose-controlled proton irradiation of tumors, the efficient generation of proton energies beyond 100 MeV in near critical density targets, and the demonstration of seeded FEL gain with laser wakefield accelerated electrons bunches. In 2024 this work was awarded with the first ICUIL Yoshiaki Kato prize.

Professor at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) since 2022, he graduated from USTC with Bachelor in 1984, and from Institute of Modern Physics (IMP, CAS) with PhD in 1990. From 1993 to 2004, he worked at IMP, and from 2004 to 2022 at Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP, CAS). He has also about eight-year experience in several European laboratories such as GANIL (Caen, France), CAL-MEDICYC (Nice, France) and FZJ (Juelich, Germany). His main interests are accelerator physics and technology, and particle beam applications. He played key roles in facilities and projects including Heavy-Ion Research Facility at Lanzhou, China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS), China Accelerator-Driven System and Super Proton-Proton Collider (second phase of CEPC-SPPC). He initiated and promoted the projects like the Back-n white neutron source and the EMuS muon source at CSNS. Currently he is one of the leading persons in the Super Tau-Charm Facility (STCF, an electron-positron collider under R&D) project.