Hakan Bora Yavuzkara

About

Hello! I am Hakan Bora Yavuzkara, a physics and computer science double major at Davidson College. I am currently a visiting student at Oxford University for the 2026-2027 academic year. I plan to pursue a PhD in computational physics. My current research involves building a foundation model for time projection chambers under the supervision of Dr. Michelle Kuchera and Dr. Raghu Ramanujan at the ALPhA group at Davidson College. I have also recently started getting interested in DFT, Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials (MLIP), and Many-Body Perturbation Theory (MBPT).

Research

• Transformers for Track Completion: During the summer of my freshman year, I did research with the ALPhA group. I worked on implementing AdaPoinTr as a transformer-based neural network for completing the broken tracks of Active Target Time Projection Chamber (AT-TPC) data. I trained on artificially broken simulated ¹⁶O + α data, and tested on experimental ¹⁶O + α data.
• TPCNet Foundation Model: During the summer of my sophomore year, I did research with the ALPhA group. I worked on developing a foundation model for the AT-TPC using self-supervised learning, by having the model unscramble AT-TPC events as if it was solving a jigsaw puzzle. I compared this approach against training from scratch and contrastive learning. At low training sizes of up until 20% of the original data, both jigsaw unscrambling and contrastive learning outperformed training from scratch, with contrastive learning demonstrating the best performance. At high training sizes,

Publications

Soon :)

Presentations

• TPCNet Foundation Model: Poster presentation at Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) June 2026
• Transformers for Track Completion: Poster presentation at Society of Physics Students Conference (SPSCon) 2025
• Transformers for Track Completion: Oral presentation at Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) Conference 2025
• Transformers for Track Completion: Poster presentation at FRIB July 2025

Teaching

• Data Structures (3hrs/week): TA for Dr. Lim in Spring 2026. Conducted algorithm problem-solving sessions.
• Computational Physics (6hrs/week): Embedded Tutor (ET) for Dr. Michelle Kuchera in Spring 2026. Substitute lecturer 2 times. Selected as Spring 2026 superhero tutor by Davidson College.
• Physics I&II (6hrs/week): Drop-in Tutor in Spring 2024 and Fall 2025.
• Astronomy (4hrs/week): Grader for Dr. Kristen Thompson in Fall 2025
• Programming in the Humanities (4hrs/week): ET for Dr. Jakub Kabala in Fall 2025. Helped with Mathematica programming assignments and projects.

Contact

Send me an email at hayavuzkara@davidson.edu or hakan.yavuzkara@lmh.ox.ac.uk. I would love to talk about physics!