Dream team
Team
Antoine Iselgen-Wojdyla, Ph.D.
Dr. Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla is a staff scientist at the Advanced Light Source, a synchrotron radiation facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His works focuses on x-ray optical design and the development of new technologies for synchrotron optics. He led the optical design of the feature beamlines for the upgrade of the Advanced Light Source. He also has interest in coherent imaging optics and computational imaging techniques such as Fourier ptychography.
He holds a PhD from Ecole Polytechnique, a school near Paris (France) where he conducted research of terahertz radiation for biological imaging, using ultrafast techniques and polarization.
ALS profile, Berkeley Lab profile
ORCID: 0000-0003-4321-8387; github: @awojdyla; personal website: antoine.wojdyla.fr
Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla (July 2022)
Xiaoya Chong (Nov 2023)
Xiaoya Chong, Ph.D.
Dr. Xiaoya Chong received her Ph.D. degree in the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong and her B.Eng. degree from Zhejiang University and the M.Sc. degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.. Her research interests include Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision and Computational Biology. During her Ph.D. study, she also undertook research internships at Tencent AI Lab and Noah's Ark Lab-Hong Kong, where she focused on utilizing convolutional neural networks, transformers and MLPs for low-SNR data analysis.
ALS profile – Berkeley Lab profile
ORCID: – ; github: @xiaoyachong
Chaoying Gu
Chaoying Gu is a graduate student in Computational Imaging at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), where she works under the supervision of Dr. Laura Waller.
ORCID: – ; github: @arianagu; website: arianagu.github.io
Chaoying Gu (2023)
"Francis" Wei He
Francis (Wei) He
"Francis" Wei He is an ALS doctoral fellow and graduate student from the X-ray Laboratory for Research on Quantum Materials (X-Lab) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he works under the supervision of Dr. Alex Frañó.
ORCID: –; github: @whorwhey
Thomas W. Morris
Thomas Morris is the developer for the Beamline alignment using Bayesian optimization (blop) tool at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS-II.) He is currently a graduate student at Yale University.
ORCID: 0000-0002-5564-997X – github: @thomaswmorris – personal website: thomaswmorris.com
Thomas Morris (2024)
Seij De Leon
ORCID: github: @SeijDeLeon
Johnny Ho, Ph.D.
Dr. Johnny Ho is a Scientific Engineer Associate at the Advanced Light Source.
ORCID: 0000-0003-4119-4262 –g ithub: @johnnyho
Chuzida Chen
Chuzida Chen is un undergraduate student in Physics from UC Berkeley, working on a Fourier Transform X-Ray Interferometer prototype from the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.
Andrew Thomas Lindburg
Andrew Lindburg is a graduate from UC Berkeley, and he works on the Grating Writer, an internal ALS project dedicated to x-ray diffractive optics.
Ken Goldberg, Ph.D.
Ken Goldberg is the lead of the Photon Science Development group at the Advanced Light Source (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), where he oversees the development of a suite of about 40 beamlines, serving over a thousand of users each year. He worked for many years on the development of Extreme Ultraviolet microscopy, in close collaboration with industry leaders such as Intel and IDM, and on the metrology of soft x-ray optics. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley
More information at goldberg.lbl.gov
Alpha T. N'Diaye, Ph.D.
Alpha N'Diaye is a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab where he uses soft x-ray dichroism to shed light on phenomena involving magnetism and spin. In addition to the focus on complex oxides and metal thin films, Dr. N'Diaye has put emphasis to study spin transitions magnetic- and spin-crossover molecules. He has a background in creating and imaging novel magnetic spin textures, and moiré bases self organized structures. Dr. N'Diaye joined the Advanced Light Source in 2014 after postdoctoral studies at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (2010); he received his PhD in Physics on 2010 from RWTH Aachen University (Germany.)
Tanny Chavez, Ph.D.
Tanny Chavez is a computational research scientist at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she develops machine learning, data analysis, and software solutions for scientific applications. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arkansas, focusing on segmentation algorithms for breast cancer detection in terahertz imaging. Her current research centers on cross-facility machine learning, multimodal data analysis, and AI-driven scientific data analysis pipelines.
Fanny Rodolakis Simoes, Ph.D.
Collaborators
Main project collaborators:
Lahsen Assoufid (Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, IL, USA)
Susan Trolier-McKinstry (Penn State, PA, USA)
Maksim Rakitin (National Synchrotron Light Source-II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY, USA)
Thomas Morris (National Synchrotron Light Source-II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY, USA)
Boaz Nash (Radiasoft, Boulder, CO, USA)
Alex Hexemer (Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA, USA)
Mourad Idir (National Synchrotron Light Source-II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY, USA)
Xianbo Shi (Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, IL, USA)
Casey DeRoo (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa, IA, USA)
Dreamers at the Advanced Photon Source (Nov 2019)
Past members
Dream team members at large (left to right): Antoine Wojdyla, Alex Hexemer, Wiebke Köpp, Grace Luo, Tanny Chavez and Dylan McReynolds (Feb 2023)
Ali Sabbah
Ali Sabbah joined the Dream Team in September 2024, working on the mechanical design of x-ray adaptive optics mounts, and studying heatloads from synchrotron radiaitons. He has a B.Sc from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an Advanced Study Program diploma from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As of April 2025, he works for Quantum Circuits, a quantum computing startup based in New Haven, CT.
Gautam Gunjala, PhD
Dr. Gautam Gunjala earned a doctorate from UC Berkeley in 2022, which was focused on x-ray wavefront measurements and adaptive optics. He applied machine learning techniques to push the the performance of x-ray bimorph mirrors to their limits and achieve diffraction-limited quality in open-loop operation. He also worked on the use of the speckle caused by intrinsic sample roughness to characterize the aberrations of state-of-the-art Extreme Ultraviolet microscopes. He was the recipient of a DOE SCGSR grant.
He currently works at AMSL, the leading semiconductor manufacturing company, in San Jose, CA.
Gautam Gunjala at the Advanced Photon Source (Argonne National Laboratory, IL, USA)
Paola Luna at the Advanced Light Source
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA, USA)
Paola Luna
Paola Luna received a BS in Physics from San Diego State University. She worked on the use of x-ray adaptive optics in grating monochromator to achieve very high photon energy resolution and engineer the instrument function of the grating monochromator to achieve two-color imaging and other exotic used of these devices. Her simulations based on real data from existing devices showed that the current state of the art meets the specification requirements to achieve these new imaging schemes.
She is now a graduate student atht University of Arizona
Mahmoud Morsy
Mahmoud Morsy holds a MS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley. He worked on the use of speckle to accurately determine the longitudinal position of an object, without using any reference. His simulations showed that this technique, named "Supreme" (for Speckle-based Position Monitoring) could determine the absolute position known to ~10nm at a 10 mm distance, and experimentally demonstrated
He currenly works at Blue Origin.
Bryan Ochoa
Bryan Ochoa is an undergrad from the California State University, East Bay. He worked on initial characterization of Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasound Transducer (PMUT) fabricated by Penn State.
Michael Romero
Michael Jismundo Romero is an undergrad from the California State University, East Bay. He worked on distributerd instrument controls using the EPICS framework based on Raspberry Pi hardware.
He currently works at a company in Menlo Park, CA
LinkedIn: Michael Romero
