Abstract: I have spent over 10 years at Urbana-Champaign. It is my Alma Mater for both my undergrad and graduate studies in physics. Now that I’ve been gone for almost 10 years more, I’ll take this opportunity to be candid about my life after Urbana. Within this time, I had gone to do postdocs, landed faculty positions, published exciting papers, and found myself in industry. The world had also changed a lot through COVID, and now through the frenzy of generative AI, and AI in general. I am currently a staff data scientist at LinkedIn. I’ll go through, in hindsight, the decisions that have brought me to where I am today, and through the rapidly changing landscape of today’s world. I hope that through this talk, you’ll learn more about how we may be similar due to our similar backgrounds, and also our individual differences, and together hopefully help you navigate the career landscape of today. I’ll end the talk with some concrete insights into how to possibly get your foot in the door to these interviews, and what interviewers are looking for.
Bio: Jason Chang received his PhD from Urbana-Champaign in 2015 under Professor Aida El-Khadra specializing in flavor physics through techniques of lattice QCD. He went on to finish his postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab working with Dr. Andre Walker-Loud leveraging lattice QCD in the field of nuclear physics. In 2018 Jason joined RIKEN as a research scientist with the iTHEMS program under Professor Tetsuo Hatsuda. At RIKEN, Jason started to work on quantum computing algorithms. In 2021, Jason moved to LinkedIn as a data scientist and has since then worked on leveraging generative AI for internal productivity solutions.