Benjamin Young is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Labs. He received his B.S. Degree from Rice University, and his Ph.D. from Texas A&M, both in Materials Science and Engineering. His career at Sandia includes the mechanical characterization of metamaterials and system mechanical design. 

Kaitlyn Wong is currently a Hardware Systems Engineer at Northrop Grumman, where she bridges customer requirements with design solutions. She also serves as the chair for several employee resource groups within the company, both at a local and company-wide level, and is the Northrop Grumman industry board member at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Kaitlyn graduated from University of California, San Diego with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering in 2023 and a master's in systems engineering in 2025. During her time in undergrad, she served as the president and West Regional Conference chair of her SASE chapter.

Naser is the West Regional Manager for SASE.  After helping revive the Colorado State University chapter of SASE, for which Naser served as the Treasurer and Co-President, he joined the SASE national volunteer family as a Regional Coordinator for two years before assuming his current role.  Naser holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering and currently works in high performance computing as a VLSI Design Verification Engineer with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.  He has over a decade of peer mentoring experience and loves interacting with the SASE community.

Dr. C.-J. John Tam has more than 30 years of experience in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) development and applications. From 1998-2014, he was involved in the research and development of scramjet engines at the Air Force Research Laboratory/Aerospace Systems Directorate in Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. He performed numerical simulations on different components of the engine to provide a better understanding of the flow physics, thus to design more efficient scramjet engines. Since 2014, Dr. Tam joined Air Force Research Laboratory/Information and Spectrum Warfare Directorate at Kirtland AFB, NM. His research emphasizes on the flow physics around optical turrets using numerical simulations. Dr. Tam is an associate fellow of AIAA, and the author of numerous papers, journal articles, and technical presentations. He has served as a reviewer for many technical journals. He was inducted as an Eminent Engineer by Tau Beta Pi in 2010.

I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado. I then made my way to the Pacific Northwest to complete my graduate work with Dr. Gael Kurath, developing novel in vivo superinfection assays to determine phenotypic and genetic correlates of viral fitness for the salmonid rhabdovirus, Infectious Hematopoietic Necrosis virus. To fully appreciate the impact of host immune pressure on viral fitness and evolution, I joined the laboratory of Dr. Michael Gale, Jr at the University of Washington as a postdoctoral fellow. I’m now excited to bring my independent research program to the University of New Mexico to study the molecular mechanisms underlying divergent host responses to hantavirus infection.

Christina Shou is a recent grad with a bachelor of science in biochemistry and a minor in psychology at the University of New Mexico. During her sophomore semester, she joined the Kell Lab for research experience, which taught her skills including, but not limited to, western blotting, mammalian cell culture, and transfections. After grad, she is continuing to apply her knowledge of biochemistry in the field of virology as well as exploring topics in marine biology and cancer research.

Software engineer at Microsoft for 4.5 years straight after undergrad, joined after internship. Interned then worked full time on Azure Machine Learning backend, eventually switching teams to AI Foundry website frontend, and most recently, PowerBI frontend.

Take a souvenir home with our friendship bracelet workshop, commemorate newfound relationships!