Where are they now?

Chris Decker turned from experiment to computer simulation for his Ph.D.  Since receiving it, he has been working at Livermore, except for a short stint in industry.  He and Rubina had a son, and the happy family can be seen here.  

Gaetan Chevalier is Senior Loan Officer at UniTrust Mortgage Co. in San Diego.

Max Light did his Ph.D. work at Los Alamos, where he designed and built a large helicon machine  with ECR injection.  He studied the onset of drift and  Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities and measured the anomalous transport that they caused to limit the plasma density.  He and Tess have two sons, Milo and Griffin, and he continues to work at LANL, mostly on defense projects.

  Max is the one at the lower right.          Milo, Tess, Griffin, and Max Light                                 

 Dave Blackwell graduated after doing three experiments for his thesis and has been working at the Naval Research Lab on plasma diagnostics.

     Dave in leaner years                         Dave's group at NRL                                    Married to Adrienne, 2003              In Puerto Rico, 2005

Kiko Sudit went to Stanford business school and got an MBA; he has been working in the investment advisory business.  He and Mikhal now have three kids and live in Calabasas.  

                        Kiko and family                                        Kiko and Abigail                            Ella and Adam

David Miljak returned to Australia, where he works at CSIRO on microwaves.  He married his old girlfriend and has become a contented father.

Xicheng Jiang went to work at Broadcom in Irvine and was in that hot company from the beginning.  He is an expert in analog-digital circuit design.  He returned to UCLA to defend his Ph.D. thesis, which is on the design and testing of a 2-GHz sampling ADC chip.  He and his wife now have two daughters.  News: Xicheng has become Senior Manager and Broadcom Distinguished Engineer.

Laurie Porte returned to Europe after marrying his French fiancee and now works at the plasma lab in Lausanne, Switzerland.  He and Caroline are proud parents of a son James, who is helping him build a helicon source.

Mum and James  

Dave-O and family

 Seok-Min Yun worked with George Tynan in UC San Diego for a couple of years before leaving for industry.  He is now on the staff of  Lam Research.  His daughter, born in San Diego, seems to have grown up a lot!

Tsitsi Madziwa-Nussinov:  Having graduated in 2003, Tsitsi is married to Zohar Nussinov, a solid-state physicist.  They have three children, Tari, Ethan, and Maya, and live in St. Louis, MO.  After a stint in Los Alamos, she now works in the Physics Dept. and McDonell Center for Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. 

 Tsitsi,at graduation        Tsitsi and Ethan      Tsitsi and family

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Humberto Torreblanca graduated in February, 2008, after building, operating, and characterizing the Medusa 2 eight-tube, permanent-magnet helicon source.  He and wife Lucyna live in Oregon, which has weather closer to Lucyna's Poland than to Humberto's Peru.  Humberto worked at Intel in Oregon until 2013   NOw they are back in Marina del Rey, CA.

Lucyna and Humberto

Davide Curreli joined the lab from October, 2009, to September, 2010.  Back in his home town of Treviso, Italy, he married his long-time girlfriend and fiancée Chiara in 2011.  In 2011 Davide and family (now a son and a daughter) moved to the Univ. of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, where he was in charge of all David Ruzic's students!

  Davide in lab        Davide and Chiara