Samya Zain gained her PhD at The State University of New York, and was awarded the Best Teaching Assistant Award in 2002. She is currently an associate professor of physics and the department head of physics at Susquehanna University, and was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award there in 2016. She has been a member of the BABAR scientific research collaboration at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) at Stanford University, California, and the ATLAS collaboration at CERN.