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 was Director of Research at the California Institute for Human Science in Encinitas, north of San Diego.  He is now Senior Loan Consultant at UniTrust Mortgage Inc. 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 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 diagnostics of their large-area plasma device.

     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.  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 has become an expert in analog-digital circuit design.  He recently 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.  From the looks of his new office, he seems to have a prosperous future!

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:  During her Ph.D. years, Tsitsi married Zohar Nussinov and had a son, Ethan.  Her daughter Tari had come from over from Zimbabwe, and they are now a family of four.  Tsitsi graduated in 2003, and they now ive and work in Los Alamos.  

 Tsitsi,at graduation           Tsitsi and family    

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Frank Chen had some visitors after the Long Beach DPP meeting:

Chen, Fruchtman, Godyak, Shamrai, and Shinohara.  Right:  plus Smolyakov and Ande Chen

Otherwise, he can be found in his office everyday except when visiting grandchildren or outdoors trying to get in shape for the next marathon  

  Click to enlarge