Jorge Cham, Daniel O. Whiteson

Jorge Cham is a Chinese-Panamanian post-doc best known for his popular newspaper and web comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics). He first started drawing PhD Comics as a graduate student at Stanford University, and has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in three published book collections.

Jorge Cham received his Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in 1997, and earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He subsequently worked at Caltech as an instructor and as a researcher on neural prosthetics.

In 2005, Cham began an invited speaking tour of over 80 major universities delivering his talk titled "The Power of Procrastination". In this lecture, Cham talks about his experiences creating the comic strip and examines the sources of grad students' anxieties. He also explores the guilt and the myths associated with procrastination and argues that in many cases it is actually a good thing.

Daniel O. Whiteson is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at UCI, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and conducts research using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.

Professor Whiteson’s research interests are in the field of Experimental High Energy Physics. He is interested in probing the structure of matter and the nature of its interactions at the very smallest scales, to understand the fundamental nature of our universe. Whiteson is part of the ATLAS collaboration which built, maintains, and collects data from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered.