3 pictures of experiments with tagline in front.

Who’s Who at the Lab-Tong Liu

Name: 
Tong Liu
Position: 
Graduate Student in Physics
What do you do here at Wright Lab?  

I am a rising fourth-year graduate student. I’m also on the WIDG seminar organizing team, so if you have interesting results or progress to share with the Wright Lab community, please let me know.

I’m working for Prof. Helen Caines on the STAR experiment. More specifically, I am looking for the Quark Gluon Plasma in small systems.
 
What is the most unique and/or exciting experience you’ve had here at Wright Lab? 
Among all of the exciting experiences I’ve had, I think I’d like to feature here the “Fancy Friday” we had when Raymond Ehlers graduated from our group. He had expressed that he wanted to be able to wear his fancy tuxedo to his defense, so we decided to enable this by having everyone else also wear something fancy.  We all appeared in our best suits & dress that day (see Fig. 1), giving our senior members a complete surprise; we also collectively showed up at the Happy Hour in SPL, which completely made the day :).
group photograph
Fig.1: Fancy Friday photo! It was meant to be a surprise for our senior members, so none of them were in fancy dress.
 
What are you personally working on in regards to the COVID-response efforts?

I was working at the Chinese Association here at Yale.  We gathered donations from our students and scholars, with which we purchased a fair amount of personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals in Wuhan when the virus first burst there. A portion of the PPEs successfully arrived in Wuhan, and we rerouted the rest of them to nearby hospitals when the outbreak started in America, including Yale New Haven Hospital.

What is something that people might not know about you that you’d like to share with the community? 

I’ve made myself a fair cook over the past few years in New Haven— from hardly knowing how to cook at all!

Where do you like to work remotely?

Mostly my working station in my bedroom (see Fig. 2, below), but when I’m reading literature, I can also end up lying on the bed more than I care to admit, holding my laptop in a weird position.