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Sam Young

I’m a second year PhD student in the Physics Department at Stanford University interested in helping computers understand particle physics. I am advised by Kazu Terao and Hiro Tanaka in the neutrino group at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and work on reconstruction techniques for 3D particle imaging detectors called liquid argon time projection chambers. The experiments I work on aim to understand the properties of neutrinos, invisible fundamental particles that rarely interact with matter.

I’m broadly interested in:

  • Self-supervised representation learning and foundation models 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 from Penn in 2023 with a bachelor’s and master’s in physics.

news

2025 I will be presenting my work on foundation models for scientific imaging (LArTPC data) at the APS Global Summit.
2024 I was awarded the HAI Graduate Fellowship!
2024 I will be presenting my work on differentiable surrogate modeling of optical propagation in LArTPCs at APS April.
2024 I won Stanford’s CS 229 Machine Learning’s Best Project Award for my rotation work on pileup synthesis and anomaly detection for the ATLAS experiment.
2023 I graduated from Penn summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in physics, and will continue my studies at Stanford.
2023 I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa!
2021 I won the Roy and Diana Vagelos Challenge Award (two years full tuition and fees) at Penn!

publications

2025

  1. latent_space.png
    Particle Trajectory Representation Learning with Masked Point Modeling
    Sam Young, Yeon-jae Jwa, and Kazuhiro Terao
    2025