Chong Jiang is from Austin, and went to Westwood High School here in town. His father is an electrical engineer, and Chong came to UT to enter the EE program. Apparently EE wasn’t challenging enough, and when he heard some of his dorm roomates raving on about Professor Pete Anotoniewicz’s PHYSICS 315: WAVES class, Chong crossed over and decided to also pursue a Physics degree. By the end of his last semester, he’d accumulated over 230 credit hours here at UT, so he was pretty busy obtaining those two degrees. He did research on theoretical analysis of wireless networks and data transfer rates with Professor Sriram Beschwanatch in the EE department, and starting in Fall ’08 he’ll be going to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne to pursue his PhD in EE in communications or networking.

Halil Saka is from Nicosia, Cypris (at population 50,000, it’s a little smaller than UT). Halil entered UT at the ripe old age of 16 years, so was in a hurry to get started with his career in Physics. Halil has stood out in all of his classes here in the Physics Department, and many instructor know him well for his weekly grilling sessions (he grilled the professors, not the other way around), in which he would challenge us for better explanations, or else he would even come to office hours with a better derivation. Halil was also nominated for the College of Natural Sciences Book Award. Halil did an undergraduate honors thesis with two professors here in the Physics Department, Bengtson (experimentalist) and Reichl (theorist), continuing a study in Brownian motion that he began in his junior lab class under professor Bengtson. Halil is continuing his studies in the PhD program at Princeton, where he will pursue research in elementary particle physics.