Postdoctoral Researchers
Yizhou Xin
Postdoctoral Researcher, Wang Group. Appointed at UCLA through a subaward from Prof. Wang’s DOE award (DE-SC0025712); hosted in Prof. Stuart Brown’s laboratory in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Yizhou joined the group in April 2026 and leads our zero- and low-field nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) effort under uniaxial strain. His program extends the group’s kagome work along two complementary directions: strain-tuned charge order and flat-band-driven strange metallicity in kagome metals proximate to quantum criticality, and microscopic magnetism in rare-earth kagome intermetallic families where chemical substitution tunes competing magnetic ground states. These measurements are coordinated with our high-field NMR efforts at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
Yizhou earned his Ph.D. in physics from Northwestern University in 2021 with Prof. William P. Halperin, using NMR and numerical modeling to map the electronic and magnetic phase diagram of heavily Cu-doped iron pnictides. Before joining the group he held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern, where he developed NMR protocols for superconducting niobium thin films used in quantum devices, and at Princeton, where he applied optically detected magnetic resonance with nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to probe magnetism in van der Waals materials.
Graduate Students
Jhersie Cabigting
M.S. Candidate, Wang Group. Thesis co-supervised with Dr. Tomas Orlando at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL).
Jhersie develops dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) methodology for mixed-phase (solid–liquid) systems, using a silica-supported TEMPO radical to probe how polarization transfer changes when the radical is tethered rather than freely diffusing. His measurements are carried out on the 14.1 T liquid DNP instrument at NHMFL, and he is a co-author on:
T. Orlando, H. Bui, J. Cabigting, N. Ibbetson, J. van Tol, T. Dubroca, X. Wang, F. Mentink-Vigier. “Impact of non-polar solvents in dynamic nuclear polarization at high magnetic fields.” Journal of Magnetic Resonance 375, 107885 (2025).
Undergraduate Students
Anthony Ma
Undergraduate Researcher, Wang Group.
Anthony applies electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) to functionalized metal–organic frameworks as part of our collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories. Through two research visits to the NHMFL in 2025 and 2026, he has contributed high-field EPR measurements on aluminum-hydride confinement in bipyridine-functionalized MOFs, where EPR resolved the bipyridyl radical signature of single-electron transfer, and on a copper-based MOF system. His contribution is acknowledged in:
M. Shivanna, N. A. Torquato, S. Li, M. A. T. Marple, et al. (incl. X. Wang). “Single-Electron Transfer Stabilizes Metastable Alane in a Bipyridine-Functionalized MOF Nanopore.” Journal of the American Chemical Society 147, 47398–47408 (2025).
Alumni
Natalie Ibbetson
Undergraduate Researcher, Wang Group. Now Ph.D. student, Department of Chemistry, University of California, Davis.
Natalie worked on dynamic nuclear polarization at high magnetic fields during her undergraduate studies, with research training at the NHMFL through the 2024 NSF REU program. She led an independent project searching for 15N Overhauser DNP in liquids at 14.1 T — combining DFT hyperfine-coupling calculations with experimental tests on aniline/radical systems — and contributed to a published study of solvent effects in high-field liquid DNP. She presented both projects at the Experimental NMR Conference (ENC).
T. Orlando, H. Bui, J. Cabigting, N. Ibbetson, J. van Tol, T. Dubroca, X. Wang, F. Mentink-Vigier. “Impact of non-polar solvents in dynamic nuclear polarization at high magnetic fields.” Journal of Magnetic Resonance 375, 107885 (2025).
- Email: neibbetson@ucdavis.edu