Bao's journey into plasma physics started at Imperial College London, where he worked on laser wakefield accelerator lab automation under Professor Zulfikar Najmudin. It was here that he was first introduced to different plasma diagnostics and particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, which he later worked on in several other projects!

 

In the summer of his second year, he did a SULI internship at SLAC National Lab under Professor Spencer Gessner. He worked on benchmarking the PIC code WarpX for linear collider applications.

 

During his exchange year at MIT, Bao learned more about the milestone ignition achievement at NIF and started to develop an interest in fusion energy. For this reason, he contacted the High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) group at MIT for a research project. Since then, he has been working under Dr. Maria Gatu Johnson to simulate modulated deuteron spectra observed by the MRS - one of the group's most important diagnostics.

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Outside of plasma physics, Bao briefly worked on computational chemistry at the University of Medicine & Pharmacy HCMC (in Vietnam). Here, he ran molecular dynamics simulation to evaluate the potential of different molecules in preventing antibiotics resistance in different bacteria.

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