Simons Society of Fellows

Sonja Billerbeck is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Virginia Cornish in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in the interdisciplinary Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE).

Y-Lan Boureau was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2014 as a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. She resigned her Fellowship in 2015 after accepting a position at Facebook. She did her undergraduate studies at École Polytechnique in France and completed her Ph.D. at New York University and École Normale Supérieure, working in machine learning and computer vision.

Eric Castillo is an incoming postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College. He received his A.B. in anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis and his A.M. and Ph.D. in human evolutionary biology from Harvard University, where he worked with Professor Daniel Lieberman to study the evolutionary biomechanics of the human lumbar spine.

James Dama is an incoming postdoctoral scientist in the department of chemistry at Columbia University. He completed his Ph. D. at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Gregory Voth on multiscale physics methods for the study of biomolecules, with particular focuses on adaptive enhanced sampling methodology and the physics of many-body coarse-grained free energies.

Keith Hawkins is an incoming postdoctoral research fellow in astronomy at Columbia University. He received his B.S. in astrophysics with minors in mathematics and African studies from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University in 2013 and is completing his Ph.D. in astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, under the guidance of Gerry Gilmore and Paula Jofre.

J. Colin Hill is a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Columbia University. He attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied physics and mathematics.

Ailsa Keating was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2014 as a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of mathematics at Columbia University. She completed her Ph.D. in the mathematics department at M.I.T., working under the direction of Paul Seidel. Prior to coming to M.I.T., Keating received a B.A. and M.Math. (Part III) from the University of Cambridge.

Dion Khodagholy is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neuroscience Institute at the NYU Langone Medical Center. He received his master’s degree from University of Birmingham (UK) in electronic and communication engineering in 2008, followed by a second master’s degree in microelectronics at École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne (France).

Chervin Laporte is a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Columbia University. He received his master’s degree from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.

Boris Leistedt was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2015 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University. He resigned his Fellowship in 2016 after accepting a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. He completed his Ph.D. with Hiranya Peiris at University College London. He received a master’s degree in physics from University Paris Sud (Orsay), as well as a joint master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Mons (Belgium) and Supélec (France).

Ilya Razenshteyn is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Aditi Sheshadri is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, hosted by Professor Lorenzo M. Polvani. She has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the R. V. College of Engineering in Bangalore, India, and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

James Stafford is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at New York University School of Medicine. He began his studies at Eastern Oregon University as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) with Prof. K. Matthew Lattal, where he focused on behavioral approaches to psychiatric disease-associated learning and memory processes.

Jonathan Ullman was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2014 as a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of computer science at Columbia University. He resigned his Fellowship in 2015 due to receiving a faculty position. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2013 and stayed there for a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Research on Computation and Society. While at Harvard, he had the good fortune to be advised by Prof. Salil Vadhan. Prior to coming to Harvard, he graduated from Princeton 2008 and spent a year trading stock options on the floor of the American Stock Exchange.

Omri Weinstein was appointed as Junior Fellow in 2015 as postdoctoral research scientist in the department of computer science at New York University. He resigned his fellowship after accepting a position as an assistant professor in the Theoretical Computer Science group at Columbia University.