New hires working on ExoHad

The Collaboration is happy to announce that two members, Andrew Jackura and Arkaitz Rodas, were hired on tenure-track positions to continue developing the ExoHad program. Moreover, Vanamali Shastry has joined a postdoctoral researcher position.

Andrew Jackura is an Assistant Professor of Physics in the Nuclear Theory group at William & Mary. Andrew joined William & Mary in August 2023 as part of the ExoHad initiative.
Andrew’s research focuses on few-body nuclear and particle reactions, using theoretical and numerical tools to connect low-energy reactions to the fundamental theory of nuclear forces, Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD). In particular, he is interested in hadron spectroscopy, three-body dynamics, and electroweak interactions of hadrons.
Andrew is also a member of the Hadron Spectrum (HadSpec) collaboration, which is an group specializing in using high-performance super computers to study hadron reactions and spectroscopy from first principles. Andrew is also an affiliated member of the Joint Physics Analysis Center (JPAC), an international group of theorists, phenomenologists, and experimentalists who work together to provide analysis tools for hadron spectroscopy. See more on https://ajackura.github.io/.

Arkaitz Rodas Bilbao is a nuclear physicist working as the Nathan Isgur fellow at JLab, and soon to be a joint assistant professor with Old Dominion University. He studies unstable particles, called resonances, produced via strong interactions of hadrons, both from phenomenological analyses of experimental data, as well as using the theoretical technique known as lattice QCD. Other research topics include AI/ML applications and the development of particle reaction models for experimental analyses. He is a member of the ExoHad topical collaboration, HadSpec, and JPAC. In 2022, he was awarded the JSA postdoctoral prize for his research on non-ordinary mesons.
Before joining JLab, Arkaitz completed his Ph.D. in 2019, distinguished with the “Extraordinary Prize”, and a Master's in Theoretical Physics in 2014, at Complutense University of Madrid. He obtained a Bachelor in Physics at the University of the Basque Country in 2013.


Vanamali Shastry joined the ExoHad collaboration in June of 2023. He arrived to Indiana University from Poland where completed his fist postdoctoral appointment at University of Kielce with Prof. Francesco Giacosa. Vanamali’s expertise specializes in amplitude analysis and meson spectroscopy. He is focusing on developing reaction models for meson resonance photoproduction. He closely collaborates with GlueX and CLAS12 experimentalists.