
Sam Young
I’m a second year PhD student in the Physics Department at Stanford University interested in helping computers learn understand particle physics on their own. I am advised by Kazu Terao and Hiro Tanaka in the neutrino group at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and work on reconstruction techniques for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and it’s predecessors. The experiment aims to understand the properties of neutrinos, invisible fundamental particles that rarely interact with matter.
I’m broadly interested in:
- Self-supervised representation learning for scientific imaging data
- 3D computer vision for particle physics
- Differentiable surrogate models for simulation calibration
I’m grateful to be supported by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Graduate Fellowship.
Previously, I worked with Julia Gonski of the SLAC ATLAS group on applying machine learning techniques for anomaly detection in the ATLAS experiment at CERN, and with Giorgio Gratta of the Stanford neutrino group on detector R&D for the upcoming nEXO experiment. Before that, I was a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania working with Prof. Josh Klein on novel neutrino detector instrumentation for THEIA, a proposed hybrid optical neutrino detector. I graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Penn in 2023 with a bachelor’s and master’s in physics.
publications
2025
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Particle Trajectory Representation Learning with Masked Point Modeling2025